TheMidnightGarden

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which felt appropriately mundane for the end of the world. Clara stood in her cramped kitchen, rain streaking the windows, and read the words three times before they made sense. Your grandmother, Helena Ashford, has passed. As her sole heir, you inherit the Thornwood Estate, including the main residence and all its contents. All its contents. As if a life could be reduced to inventory. She hadn't seen her grandmother in seven years—not since that summer when she was twenty, when something happened in the garden that neither of them would ever speak of again. Clara had convinced herself she'd imagined it. The shimmer in the air. The flowers that seemed to move. The voice that called her name from somewhere deep within the hedge maze. Now, as she read the letter a fourth time, a fifth, she felt that old sensation again: the prickling at the back of her neck, the sense that the world was thinner than it appeared. The rain fell harder. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled. And on her windowsill, impossible in February, a single midnight rose began to bloom.