The rain didn't let up for three days.
La Sirena felt smaller under the weight of the weather. The stone walls sweated. The windows blurred. Lina's skin buzzed with a static that wouldn't leave. She hadn't slept. Couldn't. The silence had teeth now.
Milo found her in the hallway, arms crossed, pacing in front of the door to the library she rarely entered.
"You think I should open it?" she asked without looking at him.
"What's in there?"
"Memories. Or lies pretending to be."
He leaned against the wall. "Sometimes it's both. Doesn't mean they don't matter."
She hesitated, then reached for the handle.
The room was dim, lined with old books and older dust. A desk in the corner, scattered with yellowed papers. As she stepped inside, her breath caught. The smell—the ink, the sea-salt dampness—it was familiar. It twisted something in her gut.
On the desk: a stack of her manuscript pages. Originals. Annotated.
She flipped through them.
The handwriting in the margins wasn't hers.
Milo entered quietly. "What is it?"
She held out a page. "These notes... they're his. Matteo's. He used to edit my work in red pen. Said it helped him feel useful."
Milo took the page, reading a line scribbled in the margin. *"This line's good. Feels honest. Keep it."
"Someone brought these here," she said. "Recently. They weren't here when I arrived."
He set the page down. "Are you sure it was him?"
"Yes. I know his handwriting. And look—this one has a coffee stain. He spilled espresso on it the night we fought."
Milo said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly: "You think someone else has been in the house?"
"I don't know what I think anymore. But someone wanted me to see this. Someone wants me to go back."
She sat heavily in the old desk chair. Her fingers trembled as she picked up another page.
"There's more," she said, voice cracking. "Look at this—he wrote, 'You go too far when you write about pain that isn't yours.'"
Milo frowned. "What did he mean?"
"I think he knew about my childhood. About the parts, I buried in fiction. Maybe he resented me for not telling him the real story."
She pulled open a drawer. A photograph lay folded inside. Matteo, standing on the beach and not smiling.
On the back, in that same red pen:
You only ever told the truth when you thought no one was watching.
She looked at Milo, her eyes wide with realization. "Whoever's doing this... they know both versions of me. The one I showed the world. And the one I only wrote down."
A long pause stretched between them.
Milo knelt beside her chair, his voice low and steady. "Then it's not random. Someone close. Someone who knew what he meant to you. And who knows what you're capable of."
She whispered, "I'm scared it's someone I loved."
He looked up at her, eyes unreadable. "Then we find out together."
The rain slammed harder against the roof. The room felt colder.
And somewhere beyond the walls, something was shifting—something old, something dangerous, something ready to break.