Previous week

Welcome to Penny’s Diary, a contemporary urban-fantasy serial. Read new diary entries every Thursday. Supporting readers can also access a weekly Writer’s Commentary, along with immersive audio and eBook editions, after each entry.

New to Penny’s story? Begin at the very first entry by clicking the button below and step into the moments where everything started to change.

Start at the beginning

Need to catch up?

Read a short guide through Penny’s diary so far — trace what she’s uncovered, what was taken from her, and how the truth keeps slipping out of reach.

Catch Up: The Story So Far

Penny’s Diary stands on its own—but this world holds more stories, waiting when you’re ready.

Explore the AffinityVerse

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Wrong Room Again

Gramps brought us back from Clearwater Sunday evening.

I slept for most of the drive.

Not cute sleeping either.

More mouth-open, neck-at-an-angle, probably-losing-circulation sleeping.

Very glamorous. Very mysterious-medical-condition chic.

Ellie slept too.

She was beside me in the back, pale and exhausted, with her head against the window until one turn somewhere outside Meridia Falls shifted her against my shoulder.

She was just my friend.

Gramps carried our bags upstairs to my apartment because apparently neither of us looked qualified to operate luggage.

The Meridian was busy underneath us.

Kitchen noise. Plates. Someone laughing in the restaurant. Music low enough that I could only hear the bass through the floor.

Home.

That part felt right.

The rest mostly did too.

Ellie took her Clearwater bag into the purple room.

Because that was where she was staying.

Her room.

She paused in the doorway and gave me a tired little smile.

“I might actually sleep until school starts.”

“Same.”

Then she went inside.

And I went to my room.

Normal.

I changed into pajamas and finally noticed the envelope on the bedside table.

Cream paper.

Typed letter inside.

Small red eye stamped at the bottom.

That definitely got my attention.

The message wasn’t an explanation.

It just gave me instructions.

Find my secret hiding place.

Touch a page in the first book I find there.

Weird and suspicious.

Also, annoyingly, kind of inviting.

I read it twice.

Then a third time, because there is something deeply suspicious about receiving treasure-hunt instructions from somebody who apparently knows where you hide things.

Ellie was settling into the purple room.

Gramps was downstairs in the restaurant.

And I was standing in my bedroom holding a mystery letter telling me to go looking for a hidden book.

So yeah.

I went.

Getting Me Back

I crossed the hallway to Gramps’s apartment in my pajamas.

Again.

Apparently dignity was optional during emergencies.

The instructions took me straight to my old bedroom.

Then the AC vent.

My fingers were already shaking when I pulled the cover loose.

There was a pile of green books inside.

I took out the one from the top.

I sat on the floor with it across my knees and stared at the cover.

The letter had been very specific.

Touch a page inside.

So naturally—

I touched it.

The world hit me all at once.

Ellie.

Not friend Ellie.

My Ellie.

Her moving into the apartment for real.

Her clothes mixed with mine.

Her pillow on our bed.

The tomb door shutting.

Marilyn trapped beside me.

The magic door.

RG pulling me through.

London.

Big Ben.

Maz looking at me and choosing her own name.

The Memory Vault.

Bobby.

The six women.

Same face.

Different names.

Different towns.

One date.

Ellie staring at the laptop screen and saying they looked like her mom.

The QR code.

Teddy promising he wouldn’t touch it until we got back.

Clearwater.

Letters.

Anchors.

Monday at Cascades.

Four of us.

It wasn’t like remembering normally.

There was no neat order.

No beginning and end—just pieces of my actual life slamming through the version Clearwater had left behind.

Then the migraine hit.

Like an old friend I definitely had not missed.

I pressed my forehead against my arm until the room stopped trying to tilt sideways.

For a few seconds, all I could hear was myself breathing.

Then I looked around my old bedroom.

My old bedroom.

Because I didn’t live here anymore.

I lived across the hall.

Above the Meridian.

With Ellie.

Clearwater had kept her close again.

My stomach dropped.

Ellie.

She was across the hall right now.

Putting her things in the purple room.

Thinking she was my friend.

I grabbed my diary and got up too fast.

Ellie was sleeping in the wrong room.

And I was not leaving her there.

Getting Us Back

Ellie was still in the purple room.

Of course she was.

She was halfway through unpacking like this was completely normal.

Like she slept here.

Like I slept down the hallway.

She looked up when I appeared in the doorway holding my diary.

“Penny?”

Friend voice.

Again.

That word should not be able to hurt when nobody has actually said it.

Apparently it can.

I did not run at her with the dragon drawing this time.

Growth.

Possibly.

First I sat beside her and told her I needed her to trust me about something very strange.

Which, considering our friendship according to Clearwater currently included approximately zero tomb kidnappings, magical bookstores, memory resets, or girlfriends, was a fairly large request.

She stared at me.

Then at the diary.

Then back at me.

“You’re scaring me.”

“I know.”

That shut me up properly.

Then I grabbed her dragon drawing from the window-seat cache and placed it in her hands.

Instant memory blast.

Instant black veins.

Her face crumpled.

“Penny.”

Different voice.

Neither of us cried into the other one’s hair at all.

Obviously.

When Ellie finally pulled back, she touched my face like she was checking I was still there.

Then she kissed me.

Quick.

Shaky.

Enough.

For about ten seconds, I forgot every other problem in the universe—then I remembered the six women.

The ones who looked exactly like her mom.

“Ellie. The women?”

She went still.

My stomach twisted.

“My mom.”

That was enough.

But she kept going.

“Six names. Six places.”

Then quieter:

“They all looked like her.”

Relief should not feel like being punched.

Turns out there are exceptions.

Clearwater had taken that from her too.

Her bag came back to our room.

Obviously.

That was when I noticed the pendant was still around my neck.

The one Ellie bought me at Willowfen.

Still there.

Which meant Clearwater had found somewhere else to put that memory too.

Whatever it had done with that memory could wait until tomorrow.

The physical stuff couldn’t.

We checked that afterward because apparently romance in our lives now includes medical evidence.

Three puncture marks.

Still there on both of us.

Then the blacklight.

Me first.

The triangles lit up under it.

Unmistakable.

Ellie’s did too.

Fresh from Clearwater.

Of course.

She turned away to put the light down, and I saw the back of her neck.

Warmth still buzzed through my fingers.

So I kissed her there.

No planning.

No dramatic reason.

Just because I could.

Ellie leaned back against me.

And for one small second, that was enough.

I tightened my arm around her.

There was still Teddy.

Maz.

And all the things that needed checking.

But not tonight.

Tonight Ellie was back in our bed.

We were back in our home.

That was enough truth for one day.

Tomorrow we found out if there were still four of us.

Monday, August 31, 2026

Four at the Table

Me and Ellie got to Cascades early.

Not suspiciously early.

Just with enough time to finally compare what Clearwater had done with Willowfen before Teddy and Maz arrived.

Apparently me and Ellie had still gone.

Just as friends.

Separate rooms at the Bellwether.

Same trip.

Same pendant.

Completely different explanation.

Just a gift from a friend.

Clearwater had not erased the vacation.

It had just rewritten why we were there together.

Then I thought about London.

And stopped.

London was gone.

No tomb lock-in.

No emergency rescue from the Rogue Ghost.

No UK layover.

Which left one fairly important question.

What did that mean for the heist?

And Jenny?

We would have to check with RG later.

Before either of us could think about that too much, Teddy arrived.

He looked tired.

He also looked like Teddy.

Correct Teddy.

Which felt like an achievement now.

He slid into the booth and said the important part first.

“It worked again.”

That was enough.

His memories matched ours where they were supposed to.

Clearwater.

The apartment.

London.

Maz.

The six women.

The QR code.

And no, he had not scanned it.

I may have asked twice.

Possibly three times.

Then Maz arrived.

She had the Big Ben drawing with her.

Folded carefully.

Her copy.

The one with my message on it.

M, I really wish this could bring you back to me. P.

She sat beside Teddy, took one look at all three of us, and exhaled like she’d been holding it since she woke up.

Her recovery anchor had worked too.

She was back.

London.

The tomb.

Michael.

Candy.

The Memory Vault.

Us.

And Maz.

That mattered most.

She remembered choosing it.

Her choice.

Then Teddy said we should compare what the reality shift had given us before we opened everything back up.

I knew exactly what he meant.

Ellie did too.

Maz looked between us.

“The what?”

All three of us stopped.

Teddy explained it.

Briefly.

Very briefly, because I was watching Maz instead.

She wasn’t offended.

Just waiting.

Then she nodded like she’d learned one more weird household rule nobody had remembered to put in the manual.

That was when it hit me.

Three used to be automatic.

We had months of shorthand nobody had ever needed to explain.

Four was newer.

I’d wondered if Ellie or Teddy might secretly find that harder than they admitted.

Maz had become part of us very quickly.

But this didn’t feel like resentment.

Just old habits needing an update.

That didn’t make four less real.

It just meant sometimes we had to translate.

So me and Ellie told them what we’d worked out before they arrived.

Willowfen had survived the reset.

Just as a friends-only vacation.

London was different.

Completely gone from the altered memories.

What that meant for RG, the heist, or Jenny, we would have to find out later.

Then we did the quickest version possible of checking what everybody remembered.

Everything lined up.

Teddy and Maz had the same altered version we did.

I looked around the table.

Four people.

Four sets of memories.

Four anchors that had done what we asked them to do.

For about five whole minutes, I thought we’d actually beaten Clearwater.

One Missing Night

The five-minute victory lasted about five minutes.

Which was honestly generous of the universe.

We were still talking about the altered memories when Maz frowned.

Not dramatic frowning.

Thinking frowning.

“What?”

She shook her head once.

“Saturday night.”

That got all of us quiet.

Her last solid, real memory was around seven.

Then nothing until she woke Sunday morning.

The altered version had her watching TV in her room.

Going to bed.

Waking up Sunday.

Perfectly normal.

Except there was a gap in her real memories.

The ones the anchor had given back.

We went through the obvious possibilities without turning Cascades into a conspiracy summit.

Maybe Clearwater had damaged something.

Maybe she’d just forgotten.

People do forget things.

Apparently.

Useful fact.

Still rude.

Teddy did not pretend he knew what had happened.

That helped.

He just said we needed to record exactly where the real memory stopped before all four of us started filling the hole with guesses.

So we did.

Saturday.

About 7pm.

Then nothing Maz trusted until Sunday morning.

We agreed to check the same window after the next cycle and see if the gap stayed the same, changed, or suddenly came with something underneath it.

No solving it today.

No deciding it meant anything bigger than what we actually knew.

Which was this:

The anchor had brought Maz back.

But there might have been something missing for it to bring back with her.

Reality Reconstruction Mode

When we got back to the Meridian after Cascades, my mailed backup letter was waiting in the mailbox.

Late to the rescue, but points for effort.

Then we went upstairs and started putting the Memory Vault back together.

We took it apart before Clearwater.

Putting it back together was somehow worse.

Not emotionally.

Physically.

There were folders everywhere.

Teddy pulled the Truthweaver laptop out of the window-seat cache while me, Ellie and Maz started rebuilding Bobby.

First job was reinstalling the RGN app on our phones.

Once mine was working again, I messaged RG.

Penny: Back from Clearwater. All four of us. London is gone from the altered memories. Did the heist still happen? Is Jenny okay?

Then we got on with rebuilding everything else.

Maz did not ask where anything went.

That was the first thing I noticed.

She picked up her dad’s notes, crossed the room, and put them exactly where we’d left that section before Clearwater.

No hesitation.

No looking at me first.

Just Maz.

Part of the system now.

I pretended not to notice how much that mattered.

The six-woman material went back up next.

Printouts.

The handwritten names and locations.

The Polaroid of the QR code.

Holly’s “Breach!” Polaroid went back too.

Everything else followed without needing a full ceremony.

Bobby slowly stopped looking like the innocent BNB planning board Clearwater had left us and started looking like Bobby again.

Which should not be comforting.

It absolutely was.

Below us, the Meridian kept being a restaurant.

Someone dropped something heavy in the kitchen.

Gramps shouted that nobody had died.

A customer laughed.

Meanwhile—four teenagers upstairs were reconstructing a secret evidence room after a medical facility had rewritten their memories.

Normal Monday.

Then I opened the Web notebook.

I wrote down my altered memories first.

Ellie back as my friend.

Purple room.

Moving in to keep me company because Mom’s new job meant she was away more.

BNB still being a thing.

Just the perfectly innocent Media Studies version.

Willowfen still happened.

Friends-only vacation.

London did not happen at all.

Then Ellie, Teddy and Maz added their altered memories.

Same narrative.

Same fake life.

Teddy made sure we recorded Maz’s gap without trying to improve it.

No theory.

No helpful explanation.

Just what was there.

And what wasn’t.

I wrote it on a Post-it note for Bobby too:

MAZ—SATURDAY NIGHT / SUNDAY MORNING
MEMORY GAP
CLEARWATER?

Question mark included.

Very important question mark.

Then my phone buzzed.

RG: Glad you’re all back safe. Don’t worry. Everything still happened. Jenny’s doing well.

Good.

Although everything was doing a lot of work there.

One less thing trying to eat my brain.

By the time we finished, the room looked like itself again.

Truthweaver on the desk.

Bobby spilling across the wall.

Paper everywhere.

Questions everywhere.

Four recovery anchors accounted for.

Four people standing in the middle of it.

That was new.

Before Clearwater, we’d built a Memory Vault for four of us.

After Clearwater, four of us knew how to put it back.

Scan Now, Panic Later

Once the Memory Vault was back, there was really only one thing left on the list.

The QR code.

After making sure Truthweaver was secure, Teddy held the Polaroid in front of the laptop’s camera.

“We are just looking at where it goes.”

That was the whole speech.

Good speech.

Very reassuring.

He scanned it.

Nothing exploded.

The laptop did not catch fire.

No creepy voice came through the speakers and announce that we had activated Phase Two of whatever nightmare we were currently living in.

Honestly, slightly disappointing.

The page barely gave us anything.

Just plain text, a slightly worrying declaration, and a button.

ACCESS CONFIRMED
REFERENCE: LONGSTONE
This page is intended for individuals possessing information concerning any listed subject.
YOUR CONNECTION HAS BEEN RECORDED.
REWARD AVAILABLE
Information resulting in the confirmed location of any listed subject may qualify for payment.
SUBMIT INFORMATION

“Your connection has been recorded.”

That part got my attention.

“Recorded how?”

Teddy was already checking.

“Nothing identifying.”

That was the important part.

No account.

No name.

No information submitted.

Still.

Somebody had built the page expecting to know when people arrived.

That felt different.

For a second, nobody said anything.

Then Ellie looked at Bobby.

So did I.

Longstone.

That one wasn’t new.

Longstone Hall was already there.

Old fire.

September 26, 2015.

The ruined building from the BoundaryBreakerUK footage.

The place I recognized without knowing why I recognized it.

We already knew it mattered.

We just didn’t know why.

And now the QR code from a page showing six women who looked exactly like Ellie’s missing mom had just pointed us straight back at it.

Which felt less like progress and more like somebody reaching through the screen and tapping Bobby with one finger.

Longstone.

Again.

Teddy checked the submission link without sending anything.

There was another message behind it.

Submissions are temporarily unavailable.
Retain all relevant material.
DO NOT CONTACT LAW ENFORCEMENT.

That one made the room go quiet again.

We had seen enough weird websites by now to have a fairly generous definition of suspicious.

Telling people not to call the police still qualified.

Then Teddy noticed the actual web address:

cerberusregistrylongstone.github.io

“Cerberus Registry.”

That was worse in a different way.

Because none of us had anything for it.

Not a place.

Not a person.

Not even a half-useful memory.

Just a phrase sitting beside something we already knew mattered.

Teddy wrote them down.

Ellie stared at the six faces that looked like her mom on Bobby.

And that was it.

No answer about who they were.

No proof one of them was Molly Horton.

No reason six different women had the same face.

The QR code had answered exactly zero of our actual questions.

It had just given us two more.

One pointed somewhere we’d already been looking.

The other meant absolutely nothing.

Yet.

LONGSTONE

CERBERUS REGISTRY

A place we knew.

A phrase we didn’t.

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

Name-Hunt Madness

Longstone turned out to be one of those words that looks useful until you actually search it.

Then it becomes everybody.

Longstone Hall.

Longstone Estate.

Longstone family.

People called Longstone.

People who married Longstones.

Dead Longstones.

Properties owned by Longstones.

Things named after dead Longstones.

By lunchtime, I was ready to ban surnames.

Truthweaver did not magically solve it for us either.

Rude.

Teddy kept narrowing the searches while the rest of us made an actual paper list, because apparently the answer to advanced technology is sometimes three teenagers with pens.

We worked backwards through old ownership records, directories, probate stuff and documents written by people who seemed personally offended by readable English.

Names started repeating.

William Longstone came up a lot.

He inherited the estate in 1902.

Then in 1904 he married Mary Manners.

Which made her Mary Longstone.

That by itself did not mean much.

Then William died in 1905.

And the estate passed to Mary.

That meant more.

We kept going.

Not because Truthweaver flashed a giant THIS WOMAN IS IMPORTANT sign.

Because her name kept surviving every time we cut away everything else.

Longstone Hall.

The estate.

Ownership.

Mary.

Again.

And again.

Eventually Teddy stopped searching.

That was how I knew we’d reached something.

Not an answer.

Just something solid enough to put on Bobby.

Ellie wrote the name while Maz held the paper straight.

MARY LONGSTONE

Then I added a question mark.

Actually—two.

Because one felt overconfident.

CERBERUS REGISTRY stayed exactly where it was on the board.

Separate.

Still useless.

We had no reason to connect Cerberus Registry directly to Mary Longstone.

The QR code had given us Longstone and the Cerberus Registry.

Longstone had now led us to her.

Which could still mean absolutely nothing.

Except her name kept cropping up.

Mostly in what Teddy had started calling the Truthweaver “deep searches.”

That was all.

Mary Longstone had been real.

She had married into the family.

Her husband had died.

She had inherited Longstone Hall and the estate.

But we couldn’t find anything that said when she died.

And more than a century later, a QR code attached to six missing women with the same face had somehow pushed us toward her name.

Which was not remotely creepy.

Very normal historical research.

Definitely what Grade 12 preparation was supposed to look like.

I stood back from Bobby.

Six women.

Longstone Hall.

Mary Longstone??

Cerberus Registry??

Still no explanation.

But Mary Longstone was there now.

A name on the board.

Not an answer.

No Detectives Allowed

By 5pm, we had officially banned ourselves from Bobby.

Also Truthweaver.

Also dead women.

Also mysterious historical estates.

Also the phrase Cerberus Registry.

Very strict rules.

Possibly necessary.

We had spent most of the afternoon with Teddy and Maz staring at records and trying to find an actual photograph of Mary Longstone.

Nothing.

Not even Truthweaver could dig one up.

By then she was starting to feel like a ghost we should personally invite over and demand answers from.

Instead, me and Ellie went out.

Like girlfriends.

Actual girlfriends.

Apparently living together, sleeping in the same bed, sharing toothpaste, and spending hours investigating mysterious women does not automatically count as dating.

I checked.

Ellie was very firm about it.

“We need at least one evening where nobody is missing, possessed, kidnapped, blackmailed, or historically suspicious.”

“That’s an aggressively specific date requirement.”

“I’m learning.”

Fair.

We took the bus into Halifax because Ellie still needed a birthday present for her dad before Sunday.

Ellie had decided she wanted something nice.

Actually nice.

Which was how we ended up in one of the expensive jewelry stores at the mall looking at things that came in boxes nicer than most of my possessions.

We eventually found a gold pen with matching gold cufflinks.

Very Mayor Horton.

Very important meetings and signing official things while looking like you definitely know what you’re doing.

Ellie chose the engraving for the pen.

Dad, with love—Ellie & Felicia

I liked that.

After the gift was chosen, we grabbed a quick bite at McDonald’s.

Then Ellie suddenly remembered school started in two days.

Very suddenly.

With the exact expression of someone who had definitely not been thinking about this since we got on the bus.

Apparently this meant we needed clothes.

Plural.

Several new outfits, minimum.

I looked at her.

She smiled.

Right.

This had always been part of the plan.

I should probably have been annoyed.

I wasn’t.

This was Ellie.

Of course a trip to buy her dad a birthday present had somehow developed a secret wardrobe agenda.

I loved her for it.

Ellie found things for herself.

Then she started finding things for me.

Which was how I ended up holding clothes that were definitely less T-shirt-and-hoodie than my usual survival strategy.

Not completely different.

Still me.

Just me with more options.

Which I was actually warming to.

By the time Ellie had finished her completely unplanned wardrobe intervention, we had enough bags to qualify as a logistical problem.

Which meant official date night could finally start.

We went to the cinema next to the mall for our first actual movie date.

The Meridian does not count, apparently.

Ellie has rules about these things.

Good thing our row was empty, because we needed the space for all the shopping bags.

We watched the new Spider-Man movie.

Which was supposed to be the distraction part of the evening.

Mostly it was.

Except there is something deeply rude about taking two girls whose relationship keeps getting erased to a movie involving Peter Parker living in a world that doesn’t remember him properly.

I mentioned this to Ellie.

She informed me I was banned from finding reset symbolism in superhero movies.

More rules.

After collecting the now-engraved pen and the cufflinks, we took the bus back to Meridia Falls.

Not Ready for It to End

We dropped the shopping bags off at the apartment.

The evening was still warm enough that staying in felt like wasting it.

So we went back out.

Frappes from Cascades.

Then the boardwalk.

We talked about school starting Thursday.

About whether living above the Meridian meant I could legally claim restaurant fries as a household utility.

About Ellie’s ongoing refusal to accept that my side of the bed was becoming increasingly theoretical.

Normal stuff.

Stupid stuff.

Our stuff.

At some point I realized I had gone nearly three hours without thinking about Mary Longstone.

A personal record.

Ellie caught me smiling.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That is never true.”

I kissed her before she could investigate further.

Quick.

Public.

The kind where I still checked no one was around first.

Then she smiled at me.

And that stupid little tingle stayed with me for the rest of the walk.

Public kisses were still something we were keeping secret.

But part of me was starting to wish they didn’t have to be.

By the time we got home, Bobby still had all its question marks.

They could stay there.

Tonight had been ours.

And there was personal time.

Which is called personal time for a reason.

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Trying Things On

After we got up, we had showers before breakfast.

Then Ellie remembered the shopping bags.

Which meant a fashion show had to happen immediately.

This had become a thing now.

She tried on her favorites first.

Obviously.

Then it was my turn.

New things.

Not completely different.

Still me.

Just fitted a little differently.

A few softer tops.

Jeans I probably would not have picked up six months ago.

And skirts.

Yes, you heard right.

Things that felt slightly more like Ellie had nudged open a door and I had decided I actually wanted to walk through it.

That part mattered.

Ellie liked basically everything.

Very objective judging.

By the time we finished, half the bed was covered in clothes and Ellie had declared several outfits school approved.

I had not realized she possessed that authority.

Apparently she did.

The Last Shiny Thing

Maz had a Porsche—apparently.

A red one.

Me, Ellie, and Teddy found this out because Maz mentioned, with the same energy most people use for returning library books, that Maple Crown was collecting it today.

There was a pause.

A very specific pause.

Teddy looked at her.

I looked at her.

Ellie looked at her.

“You have a Porsche?”

Maz frowned like we were being weird.

“It came with the title.”

Of course it did.

Because winning Maple Crown Teen came with a crown, national attention, sponsor obligations, emotional destruction, and a Porsche.

Perfectly normal prize package.

Maz pulled out her phone and showed us a photo.

Bright red.

Ridiculously shiny.

Very Porsche.

There was even a little Maple Crown logo around the plate.

Of course there was.

Even the car had to advertise the title.

The important part was that Maz had never driven it.

Never taken lessons.

Never even particularly wanted it.

It had just been there.

One more shiny piece of the whole Marilyn Moreau package that everyone else seemed much more impressed by than she was.

Maple Crown was taking it back.

They had already taken everything else.

The crown.

The title.

And now the car.

The last physical thing still tying her to them.

No ceremony.

No dramatic final drive, which would have been difficult anyway considering the whole never-learning-to-drive problem.

Just keys handed over and the car gone.

“Are you okay with it?” I asked.

Maz glanced at the photo on her phone.

“Honestly? Relieved.”

And I believed her.

Not because losing the Maple Crown title didn’t matter.

It did.

The headlines mattered.

The humiliation mattered.

People deciding what kind of person Marilyn Moreau was because Candy had handed them a version they preferred mattered.

But the Porsche itself?

That was different.

It had never really been hers in the way things are supposed to become yours.

It belonged to the title.

To Maple Crown.

To the version of Marilyn they wanted parked beside something expensive and red for photographs.

Maz looked at the photo again.

Mostly she looked lighter.

Which was probably the biggest surprise after finding out Maz had owned a Porsche in the first place.

Last-Day Logistics

After the Porsche revelation, Wednesday somehow became aggressively normal.

Teddy went to help out at Chen Print for the rest of the day.

The extra help there meant he wasn’t being swallowed whole by the shop anymore, which was good.

It also did not magically make Jin better or turn the Chen family business into something Teddy could ignore whenever Bobby got interesting.

Rude, honestly.

Maz “had” to go home.

Her mom and Candy were back from their ski trip, and apparently there was a family dinner happening.

Maz had tried to get out of it.

Her mom had responded with emotional blackmail.

Poor Maz.

Me and Ellie stayed in the apartment and attempted to prepare for school.

Attempted being the important word.

My old backpack still had things in it from before summer that should probably have qualified as archaeology.

So I transferred what I needed into my new one.

Ellie’s gift.

Which made me give her a kiss.

Which led to a quick cuddle-on-the-bed break.

Obviously essential school preparation.

Eventually, we remembered we were supposed to be getting ready for school.

Ellie made actual clothes piles.

She was much more organized.

Obviously.

New school clothes.

New not-school clothes.

Things she claimed I had stolen from her.

Things I claimed had migrated naturally because clothes follow the laws of nature and should not be blamed for where they end up.

Below us, the Meridian was doing its normal thing.

Kitchen noise.

Faint music.

People coming in and out.

Gramps appearing upstairs just long enough to ask whether we needed anything and then disappearing again before either of us could give him a job.

It still felt strange sometimes that this was home now.

Not temporary.

Not somewhere we were borrowing while Mom was away.

Home.

Mom called later.

Her new Regional Treatments Manager job was apparently exactly as glamorous as it sounded.

Which is to say meetings.

Branch visits.

Halifax.

More meetings.

And a lot more time away from Meridia Falls.

She sounded tired—but good-tired.

Busy-tired.

The kind where somebody has too much happening because they wanted more responsibility, not because the universe threw a tomb at them.

She had also sorted out Clearwater.

From now on, Mayor Horton’s driver would take me and Ellie.

Gramps would collect us afterward.

A system.

Apparently our magical-memory-destroying medical weekends now had transport logistics.

Very grown-up.

Very horrifying.

Mom said she wanted one less thing for us to worry about.

That was nice.

Actually nice.

No hidden meaning required.

Which felt unusual enough to note.

Basically thriving.

Tomorrow school started.

Grade 12.

Because apparently recovering from Clearwater, investigating six identical missing women, adding Mary Longstone to Bobby, and learning Maz had owned a Porsche did not excuse you from French.

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Back to School, Somehow

Grade 12 started today.

Which sounds fake.

I spent most of the summer being kidnapped, reset, transported to London, chased through mysteries, and helping reopen a restaurant.

Then somebody handed me a schedule.

Apparently that fixes everything.

School felt exactly familiar enough to be weird.

Same hallways.

Same lockers.

Same people talking loudly about how perfect their summers had been.

Also people carrying extremely questionable objects toward the science labs.

The summer alternative-energy project had produced miniature wind turbines, solar things, and something involving copper pipes that looked slightly explosive.

The best ones were going to a science fair in Vancouver later in the fall.

Good for them.

I was mostly impressed nobody had taken out a ceiling tile yet.

The Meridian opening had become actual town news too.

People wanted to know if living above a restaurant meant I got free food.

Yes.

Obviously.

That is absolutely the only officially interesting thing that happened to me this summer.

Everyone else had normal stories.

Vacations.

Jobs.

Family visits.

One person complained about spending two weeks at a cottage with bad Wi-Fi.

I showed incredible restraint.

Steve Dillon wasn’t here anymore either.

He’d started at West Shore Community College, studying to become a mechanic.

Which meant at least one part of the Candy-and-Steve situation had graduated out of our hallways.

Unfortunately, Candy had not.

Then the future questions started.

University.

College.

Applications.

What are you doing after Grade 12?

Where do you want to go?

What do you want to be?

I had only recently figured out where Ellie was supposed to sleep.

This felt ambitious.

Maz had it worse.

People tried not to stare at her.

Which mostly meant they stared and then looked away really fast when she noticed.

Spellbound Harmony had not magically disappeared over summer.

Neither had Maple Crown.

Or the head judge dying.

Or him trying to kill her.

All of that had followed Marilyn Moreau back to school.

Maz handled it by pretending not to notice the staring.

Then Candy pulled into the school parking lot.

Driving.

In a red Porsche.

There was a moment where my brain refused to process what I was seeing.

Same shiny red.

Same Maple Crown logo around the plate.

The same model—the same car.

Maz’s Porsche.

The exact one Maple Crown had collected yesterday.

Maz had mentioned that morning that Isaac spent most of last night’s family dinner saying he had a surprise for Candy for her first day back at school.

Apparently he had bought the Porsche directly from Maple Crown.

Because of course he had.

Candy parked like she’d been doing it forever.

The Youth Work Driving Exemption had worked out very nicely for her.

It was supposed to help people like Teddy, who actually needed to drive for Chen Print.

Somehow Isaac Steele had found a way to make Candy qualify too.

Teddy stared.

Not at Candy.

At the car.

“That is deeply unfair,” he muttered.

Maz heard him.

She looked toward the Porsche once.

Candy was still beside it.

Waiting.

Not obviously.

Candy was much better than obvious.

But she was watching.

Maz looked at the car.

Then at Candy.

Then she turned toward the school doors.

That was it.

No flinch.

No comment.

No visible rage.

Nothing Candy could take home and keep.

I almost smiled.

Candy had definitely wanted Maz to notice the Porsche.

Maz gave her about three seconds.

Generous, really.

Permission From Candy

Lunch was when Candy decided to start handing out permission.

Which should probably be illegal.

Me, Ellie, Teddy, and Maz were already at a table when she appeared beside us.

Candy smiled.

Public smile.

The kind designed for witnesses.

Then she looked at Maz.

“Marilyn, you know you don’t have to avoid everyone.”

Maz went very still.

Candy kept going like she was doing charity work.

She said she was completely fine with Marilyn sitting with us.

Hanging out with us.

Being friends with us.

Very mature.

Very reasonable.

Very Candy somehow granting permission for four people to sit at the same lunch table.

Then she looked at me.

Then Ellie.

Just long enough.

Not subtle.

She still knew exactly what me and Ellie were.

Excellent.

Candy did not make a scene.

That was the whole point.

She waited until there were fewer people close enough to hear, then dropped the nice-girl version.

The rules were simple.

Stay out of her relationship with Steve.

Don’t try another photo stunt like Three Falls.

And Marilyn was to stay under the radar and out of the limelight.

Mostly she dressed it up as everyone moving on.

Then she looked at Maz and said the one line that mattered.

“I’m giving you a chance to leave this alone.”

Maz did not answer.

Candy reached into her bag.

She tilted it just enough for us to see inside.

The Polaroid.

Me and Maz inside the Steele family tomb.

Still there.

Still hers.

And if we still had any doubt Candy remembered the real events before Clearwater, that ended there.

She was carrying proof of something the reality shift said never happened.

Then she lowered the bag again.

No threat spoken.

Didn’t need one.

Candy smiled again before she left.

Public smile back on.

Maz stared at the table for a second.

Then she said, “She still called me Marilyn.”

“Of course she did.”

That got the smallest almost-smile.

Almost.

The tomb photo was worse.

Candy had not posted it.

Which meant she still thought keeping it was more useful than using it.

Comforting.

Very comforting.

Then Ellie got quieter.

I knew why before she said it.

Her dad.

Felicia.

The six women.

“They still don’t know,” she said.

I nodded.

We had talked about it before Clearwater.

Nothing had changed enough to make the answer easier.

Ellie believed those women looked exactly like her mom.

We all did.

But we still had no proof Molly Horton was one of those women.

No explanation for the page.

No idea what Longstone had to do with it.

Telling her dad now would mean giving him the first real-looking sign of Molly in a long time and then immediately adding that we had absolutely no idea what it meant.

Ellie rubbed her thumb over the edge of her phone.

“I’m not telling them yet.”

That was Ellie’s decision.

And that mattered.

Friday, September 4, 2026

Future Plans Everywhere

Apparently Grade 12 is the year everyone starts asking what you are doing next.

Not next class.

Not next weekend.

Next life.

Very relaxed system.

Drama started it.

Miss Rivers did not pretend Spellbound Harmony Part 1 had ended normally.

Which was probably wise considering it had included public humiliation, accusations, Maz losing her Maple Crown title, and an actual attempt on her life.

Hard to workshop your way around that.

She kept it simple.

The show had mattered before everything around it became awful.

She did not want the scandal or the disaster at the end to be the last thing anyone remembered about it.

So Spellbound Harmony Part 2 was still alive.

Later.

Probably Semester Two.

No immediate rehearsals.

No immediate casting drama.

Just the possibility sitting there waiting.

Maz said nothing through most of that.

She had perfected the expression of someone concentrating extremely hard on an ordinary piece of paper.

Miss Rivers caught her after class.

I did not follow them or dramatically hide behind a door because I do have boundaries occasionally.

Maz told us afterward.

Miss Rivers had said the lead was still hers if she wanted it.

If.

That part mattered.

No pressure to prove anything.

No automatic return to Marilyn Moreau, Pageant Girl and Star of Everything.

Just a choice Maz could make later.

She had not answered.

Also fair.

English came straight after.

Miss Rivers again, because apparently she had also decided we did not have enough future decisions yet.

Our first proper assignment was a biographical profile.

Pick somebody we admired or somebody who had influenced us.

Interview them if we could

If we couldn’t, research them properly instead.

Then write the full profile.

Simple.

Normal.

That was it.

Media Studies was the one thing I had actually been looking forward to.

The Bizarre News Bulletin had existed mostly between me, Ellie, Teddy, and increasingly questionable amounts of café food.

Now we had to show it to actual people.

Terrifying.

I handled the writing and research side.

Ellie had done the visuals and branding because she understands how things are supposed to look.

Teddy had built the structure underneath it all so it behaved like a website instead of a collection of digital accidents.

And somehow—

It worked.

Not just technically.

People liked it.

Mr. Lefevre liked it.

Nobody asked why three teenagers had built a local-weirdness site with the organizational intensity of a minor intelligence agency.

Excellent result.

The important line came after the presentations.

Mr. Lefevre said anyone who wanted to could keep developing their project through the school year for extra credit, as long as we documented the research and process properly.

Me, Ellie, and Teddy looked at each other.

That was basically the whole vote.

The BNB could keep going.

Public weird.

Safe weird.

History.

Local stories.

Things we could research without accidentally publishing evidence connected to missing people, magical medical facilities, Candy Steele, Michael Moreau, or our private wall of doom.

Maybe eventually we could even spread the net wider.

International weird.

Carefully.

Bobby stayed Bobby.

BNB stayed BNB.

Extremely important separation.

Also possibly the first responsible thing any of us had done all week.

Then Math happened.

Mr. Randall was new to me.

New to everyone.

Same difference when somebody is standing at the front holding algebra.

I was tired by then.

Not Clearwater-collapse tired—just first-week-back, too-many-things-in-my-head tired.

I copied one problem wrong.

Tiny mistake.

The kind most teachers probably would have marked later and moved on from.

Mr. Randall stopped beside my desk.

“You missed the negative sign.”

That was it.

No dramatic teacher moment.

No inspirational speech.

I fixed it.

Then he added, “You had it right in the line above.”

Which was weirdly specific.

He had noticed I knew what I was doing before I messed it up.

Most adults notice the mistake first.

I looked at him.

He had already moved on.

Okay then.

Apparently Mr. Randall noticed things.

Not sinister things.

Just things.

By the final bell, I had acquired one possible future musical, one future profile, one year-long Media Studies project, and approximately nine thousand reminders that university applications existed.

Grade 12 had been running for two days.

Aggressive.

Maz still had a decision waiting about Spellbound Harmony.

The BNB suddenly had an entire school year in front of it.

And somewhere between all of that, I was supposed to work out what I wanted my actual future to look like.

Friday House Check

After school, me and Ellie stopped by Mom’s house.

Yes, that’s what I’m calling my old home now.

We’d been checking on it through the summer, but with Mom’s promotion and me permanently living at the Meridian, apparently this was a proper routine now.

Friday house check.

Mail.

Plants.

Making sure nothing had leaked, exploded, or otherwise developed opinions.

Very responsible homeowner-adjacent behavior.

Then me and Ellie went home.

Home meaning the apartment above the Meridian.

Our apartment.

The restaurant was already getting louder downstairs when we went into the Memory Vault.

Everything was still there.

The Matrix and the Web.

Bobby.

The evidence we’d put back after Clearwater.

No Truthweaver, though.

Teddy had taken the laptop home because he wanted to work on something involving search algorithms.

That was approximately as much of the explanation as I understood.

The four of us were still us.

School had restarted.

Normal life had restarted.

Apparently the future had restarted too.

And on Bobby, exactly where we’d left them, two things were waiting.

Mary Longstone.

Cerberus Registry.

CONTINUED IN:

Penny’s Diary - Week 36: Old Questions, Unexpected Connections, and a Sinister Name - Arriving in your inbox on September 10, 2026

Diary index

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. There’s more to come.

If you’d like to talk about this diary entry, you’re welcome to share your thoughts in the chat.

Stay tuned, stay enchanted, and stay connected!

Warmest Regards,

DB

🗝️ Supporting Reader Content

The Affinity Web Chronicles is a reader-supported publication. You can subscribe for free to receive new fiction every Thursday, along with regular updates.

Supporting readers unlock an exclusive Writer’s Commentary, immersive audio, and eBook editions, and help make stories like Penny’s Diary possible.

Subscribe now

Read more

Sometimes research happens before the writing.

Sometimes writing sends you looking for places afterward.

And sometimes, by complete coincidence, you find yourself walking through the same city as one of your characters — about a week before she gets there.

That is what happened with London.

In my August Workbench email, I mentioned that I had found myself in London for a few days, but that the trip deserved its own Behind the Magic email because of recent Penny’s Diary events.

This is that email.

Because somehow, while Penny’s Week 33 was waiting to arrive for readers, I ended up in London with an evening free, a very warm city around me, and a slightly ridiculous plan forming in my head.

I was going to chase Penny.

Not literally, obviously.

Probably.

But my aim was simple: visit as many of the real London locations from Week 33 as I could, and take a selfie at each place where Penny takes a Polaroid.

One evening.

Several locations.

A lot of walking.

A very hot Underground.

And one small break in the rules because, honestly, it would have been rude not to.

⚠️ A Quick Spoiler Note

Note: This Behind the Magic contains spoilers for Penny’s Diary Week 33, especially the London section.

So if you have not read Week 33 yet and want to experience Penny’s trip without knowing where it goes, you may want to come back to this one afterward.

Because we are about to follow her trail.

📓 Penny’s Week 33 London Trip

This Behind the Magic follows the real London locations behind Penny’s Diary Week 33 — from The London Antiquarian and the Earl’s Court Police Box to the tourist montage that follows.

👉 Read Penny’s Diary — Week 33

If you’ve already read Week 33, then come with me behind the magic as we follow Penny’s trail through London.

🧭 The Plan: Follow the Polaroids

In Week 33, Penny’s London trip is not exactly planned.

She does not arrive with luggage, a passport, a travel itinerary, or the usual relaxed holiday energy.

She arrives through magic, after being trapped in a tomb beneath the Steele family crypt with Marilyn Moreau.

So, you know.

Classic tourism.

But once Penny and Marilyn — soon to become Maz — finally get a few hours outside The London Antiquarian, Penny gets something close to the tourist montage she joked about at the start of the week.

Big Ben.

Buckingham Palace.

London Eye.

Tower Bridge.

Red buses.

All the spots.

For my trip, I decided to reverse-engineer that montage into a real route.

The only difference was that Penny starts with the Earl’s Court Police Box.

I ended with it.

Which somehow made the whole thing feel even more like I was chasing her through London rather than simply following a list.

For the main comparisons in this email, I’m going to focus mostly on the Polaroids featuring Penny, because those are the easiest to place beside my own photos from the same locations. But Week 33’s London section is not only Penny’s story. It is also the beginning of Marilyn choosing to become Maz, so I may let a few of her London moments slip in where they matter most.

📚 Stop One: Cecil Court and The London Antiquarian

My route began at Cecil Court.

I came in via Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, then made my way toward the little street that, in the new version of the AffinityVerse, is now home to The London Antiquarian.

This was the one location I wanted to take in slowly.

The tourist spots mattered, of course, but Cecil Court was different. This was not only a real-world reference point. This was the place where one of the most important AffinityVerse locations needed to sit.

So I walked up and down it.

Took photos.

Took videos.

Looked at the shopfronts.

Tried to imagine what Penny would notice.

The narrowness of it. The signs. The windows. The way it feels tucked slightly away from the larger movement of London, even though the city is right there around it.

That was exactly what I needed.

Cecil Court immediately felt right for the new version of The London Antiquarian.

It has that wonderful, eclectic, bookish feeling: independent shops, narrow pavements, old signs, and the sense that any doorway might lead somewhere stranger than expected.

Standing there in person helped confirm the choice.

Not a shop dropped into London.

A shop that feels like London has been keeping it secret for years.

🏛️ Stop Two: Buckingham Palace

From Cecil Court, I headed toward Buckingham Palace, cutting through Green Park on the way.

This was one of the places Penny jokes about right at the beginning of Week 33 — the kind of obvious London landmark that belongs in the imaginary movie version of her trip.

Penny standing outside Buckingham Palace, pretending she has complicated political opinions, while mainly wanting a photo.

Which is, honestly, very fair.

Because once you are there, you do want the photo.

This is where the “chasing Penny” idea started to feel especially fun.

I was not trying to write a travel guide.

I was trying to stand where Penny might have stood.

To look at the same view she would have looked at.

To see how much of the scene was already there in the real place, waiting for the fictional version to settle over it.

That is one of my favorite parts of using real locations in fiction. You do not have to invent every detail. Sometimes the world gives you the texture for free.

The railings.

The crowds.

The heat coming off the pavement.

The moment where a famous place becomes less like an image on a postcard and more like somewhere your characters could actually stand, tired and overwhelmed and trying to pretend everything is normal.

🕰️ Stop Three: Big Ben and Westminster

Next came Westminster.

Big Ben is another one of those places that almost feels unreal because you have seen it so many times before you ever stand in front of it.

It belongs to films, news reports, postcards, school books, establishing shots, and every possible “we are in London now” montage.

Which is probably why Penny’s imagined version of herself standing in front of Big Ben “like she had personally discovered clocks” felt so right to me.

That is exactly the kind of thing she would write.

And exactly the kind of thing she would still want a photo of.

In Week 33, Big Ben also becomes part of one of the quieter London moments. Penny and Maz sit outside beneath enormous cream parasols, the city moving around them, with Big Ben rising in the background as part of the view rather than the destination.

Big Ben also becomes important for Maz beyond the tourist montage, but I do not want to get too far ahead of the diary here. For now, it is enough to say that this location becomes tied to one of the first moments where Maz begins choosing who she wants to be.

I love that distinction.

Sometimes a landmark is the point.

Sometimes it is just there while something more important happens.

For Penny and Maz, London is not only about sightseeing. It is the first place where Maz can begin to exist outside the shadow of her stepsister, Candy, outside Meridia Falls, and outside the version of herself everyone else thinks they understand.

That matters more than the clock.

Although the clock is still very photogenic.

🎡 Stop Four: The One Place I Cheated

After Westminster, I walked along Westminster Bridge toward the London Eye.

This was where I broke the plan.

Penny sees the London Eye.

I went on it.

In my defense, it would have been rude not to.

This is probably the one part of the evening that was not strictly “following Penny.”

But I still think it belongs in the email because it captures something about the whole experience.

For one thing, the views were worth it.

For another, there was something lovely about seeing the city from above while thinking about how many different versions of London were layered underneath me.

The real city.

The Rogue Ghost’s city.

The impossible city beneath the surface of the AffinityVerse, where magical shops sit between ordinary streets and a bookshop can contain more space than its walls should allow.

Looking out over London from the Eye, it was easy to imagine how a place can be completely real and still feel like it has secrets.

🌉 Stop Five: Tower Bridge

After the London Eye, I continued the trail to Tower Bridge.

This was another of the “all the spots” locations from Penny’s tourist montage — one of those places that instantly says London, even before you do anything with it in the story.

Tower Bridge is one of those landmarks that always looks slightly fictional anyway.

It is too dramatic to be ordinary.

Too recognizable to feel casual.

And yet, when you are there, people are just walking across it, taking pictures, crossing the river, moving through their day.

That contrast is useful for Penny’s Diary.

Because Week 33 is built on exactly that strange overlap.

Normal people are buying coffee, catching trains, taking photos, and walking through London in the heat.

Meanwhile, Penny and Maz have arrived through a magical doorway, are staying inside an impossible bookshop, and are about to become involved in a heist connected to magical medicine.

The city does not care.

It carries on anyway.

That is part of what makes the London section work for me. The magic is huge. The stakes are enormous. But the ordinary world keeps moving around it.

🚇 Stop Six: Earl’s Court Police Box

And then, finally, came Earl’s Court.

This was Penny’s first stop.

It was my last.

After a long tube ride, I came out looking for the police box — the same one Penny sees in Week 33 after Ellie directs her there as a surprise.

In the diary, Penny comes out of Earl’s Court Station, sees the blue police box, and immediately calls Ellie.

Ellie’s response is perfect.

“You found the TARDIS.”

Technically, Penny has found a police box.

Emotionally, Ellie is correct.

This was the stop that felt most like the reward at the end of the route.

Partly because I had saved it until last.

Partly because of the Doctor Who connection.

And partly because, in the story, that moment belongs so deeply to Penny and Ellie.

Penny is bruised, stranded, wearing borrowed clothes, and trying to make the best of a week that has gone wildly, dangerously wrong.

But standing beside that police box gives her something she can send home to Ellie.

Something that belongs to both of them.

A photo from a place Penny did not choose, during a week she did not ask for, that still becomes theirs.

That is why I knew I wanted my own version of that photo.

Not because I had found the TARDIS.

Technically.

But because I had reached the end of Penny’s trail.

☕ The Real Heart of the Montage

The funny thing is, for all the famous locations, the tourist montage is not really the heart of Penny’s London trip.

The heart is Maz.

At the start of the week, she is still Marilyn Moreau — the pageant version, the controlled version, the version Candy knows how to use.

But London gives her distance.

Not safety, exactly.

Not freedom yet.

But space.

No one in London knows who Marilyn Moreau is supposed to be. No one is measuring her against the Maple Crown, the pageant circuit, Candy Steele, or the version of herself she has been trained to perform.

So when she tells Penny, “Call me Maz,” it matters.

It is not just a nickname.

It is a decision.

A line drawn between the person Candy knows how to control and the person Maz is starting to choose for herself.

That is also why I think the Week 33 visuals should not only be about Penny.

Penny is the narrator, and the diary belongs to her, but this part of the story belongs to Maz too.

And let’s not forget: some of those Polaroids of Penny only exist because Maz was the one standing behind the camera. That matters. She is not just being pulled through Penny’s London as a witness. She is helping preserve it.

So when I pair my London photos with Penny’s Polaroids, I do not want it to feel like a simple checklist of landmarks.

Buckingham Palace: done.

Big Ben: done.

London Eye: done.

Tower Bridge: done.

Police box: done.

The places matter because of what happens inside them.

The city gives Penny and Maz a strange pocket of almost-normal life between trauma and danger. They get heat, crowds, transport confusion, tourist photos, and a few hours where the impossible parts of the story have to share space with iced drinks and red buses.

That is the kind of contrast I love.

Magic is exciting.

Mystery is exciting.

But sometimes the thing that makes a story feel real is letting the characters stand in a crowd, take a photo, complain about the heat, and decide who they want to be next.

🗝️ Why the Antiquarian Had to Move

I want to come back to The London Antiquarian for a moment, because this was one of the more interesting location decisions in the new version of the AffinityVerse.

In the original continuity, The London Antiquarian sat on New Row in Covent Garden.

That version made sense at the time. It gave the shop a central London location, close to the theaterland energy of Covent Garden and the kind of streets where an odd little magical bookshop could plausibly hide in plain sight.

But as the AffinityVerse evolved, especially through The Rogue Ghost Podcast, the London side of the world became more defined.

The Antiquarian was no longer just a useful magical bookshop.

It was a major threshold.

A place connected to preserved truths, altered memory, impossible records, and the wider hidden world that Penny is only beginning to understand.

It needed to feel like a place with weight.

And because another important location also needed to sit nearby — one I am carefully not naming here — the street itself had to do more storytelling work.

That is where Cecil Court came in.

Cecil Court has exactly the kind of texture I wanted.

It feels intimate without feeling small.

Old without feeling frozen.

Bookish without feeling staged.

There is a slightly tucked-away quality to it, as though you could pass nearby a dozen times and still miss the one doorway you actually needed.

That made it perfect for The London Antiquarian.

Because the shop should not feel as though it has been placed somewhere convenient for the plot.

It should feel as though it has always been there.

Waiting.

Letting the right people find it.

Or perhaps letting the wrong people walk straight past.

That move from New Row to Cecil Court is a good example of what this new AffinityVerse continuity allows me to do.

I am not throwing everything away and starting again.

I am taking the pieces that still matter and asking where they belong now.

Sometimes the answer is: exactly where they were.

Sometimes the answer is: somewhere slightly older, stranger, and cozier, with more doors nearby than anyone sensible should trust.

📸 My London, Penny’s London

The thing I loved most about this trip was the overlap.

I was taking real photos of real places.

Penny was taking fictional Polaroids of those same places.

And somehow, putting them beside each other makes both versions feel more alive.

It is also worth mentioning that this is not the first time I have tried to bring Penny’s London trip to life visually.

In the original version of Penny’s Diary, I also created a few CGI-style London images by dropping the earlier versions of Penny and Maz into real London photos taken by a good friend of mine, who kindly let me use them.

I’m still really grateful for that, because those images helped give Penny’s London trip a visual life long before I had walked the route myself. They included the London Eye, Tower Bridge, and a police box. Not the Earl’s Court Police Box specifically, because that was harder to recreate accurately at the time, but still very much part of the same idea: Penny stepping into a real city and leaving visual evidence behind.

Looking back at those now is interesting, because they feel like an earlier version of the same instinct that drives the enhanced diary editions today.

I wanted Penny’s world to have images.

Proof.

Something that made the fictional trip feel like it had actually happened.

The new version takes that much further, especially now that I have my own real London photos to place beside Penny’s Polaroids.

It was not only the major landmarks either.

Penny also took Polaroids of the smaller London icons along the way — a red bus, a red telephone box, the kind of details that feel almost too obvious until you are standing there and realize they are exactly the things you want to remember.

So, naturally, I took my own versions too.

Those smaller details matter because they make the route feel less like a checklist of famous locations and more like a real evening in London.

The big landmarks give the story scale.

The smaller details give it texture.

That is one of the reasons the enhanced diary editions mean so much to me.

They let the story spill beyond the text.

A place can appear in the prose.

Then return as a Polaroid.

Then appear again beside one of my own photos in a Behind the Magic email like this.

The boundary between the real trip and the fictional one does not disappear, exactly.

But it gets thinner.

And that is where a lot of the fun lives.

Because for one evening, I was not just visiting London.

I was following Penny’s route backward.

I was standing in places she would stand.

Looking for the angles she might have caught.

Wondering what she would notice.

And occasionally breaking my own rules to go on the London Eye.

Which, again, was obviously necessary.

📖 Supporting Readers

Experience Penny’s London More Deeply

One of the reasons I love making the enhanced diary editions is that they let moments like this become more than text on a page.

In the standard weekly entry, Penny tells you what happened.

In the enhanced diary edition, you get to see what she kept.

In the enhanced audio edition, you get to hear how it felt.

The Polaroids. The scraps. The visual pieces of the week that make the story feel like something Penny really tucked into her diary after everything was over.

For Week 33, that means London becomes part of the diary itself — the police box, the landmarks, the tourist photos, the strange little pieces of proof from a week that was never supposed to happen.

The audio edition brings another layer to that experience, letting you hear Penny’s voice as she moves through fear, excitement, exhaustion, and the strange almost-normal moments between the impossible ones.

Together, the diary and audio editions offer the most immersive way to experience Penny’s Diary.

Supporting readers can access those expanded versions each week — and your support helps keep the AffinityVerse growing, one story, one mystery, and one diary page at a time.

👉 Become a Supporting Reader

Subscribe now

🕯️ The London I Couldn’t Visit

Of course, not every London location in Week 33 exists in the real world.

The Veiled Sigil, where Penny and Maz meet Tafarai and step deeper into the Rogue Ghost’s hidden London, is purely fictional.

Which is probably for the best.

I was already walking around London in a heat wave trying to recreate Penny’s Polaroid route. Adding a magical antiquities shop to the evening might have been ambitious.

But The Veiled Sigil still matters.

It is the other side of Penny’s London — the part sitting just beneath the tourist landmarks. The real city gives the story its texture, but places like The Veiled Sigil give it danger, secrecy, and that sense that the AffinityVerse is always larger than whatever Penny can see from the pavement.

The Veiled Sigil also lets the London section shift from “almost being tourists” into something much bigger. In Week 33, it is where Penny and Maz are pulled further into the Rogue Ghost and Tafarai’s world, where the Medies Flor, the Enchanted Music Box, and the heist all begin to take shape.

So while I could not visit it, I still wanted it represented visually.

That is one of the advantages of the enhanced diary edition. The real places can sit beside the fictional ones. Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and Earl’s Court belong to our London. The Veiled Sigil belongs to Penny’s.

And the fun is watching those two versions of London overlap.

🌟 Why This Trip Stayed With Me

London would have been memorable anyway.

It was hot, crowded, beautiful, exhausting, and full of the kind of details that always make me want to write.

But this trip had an extra layer.

Because I was not only seeing the city as myself.

I was seeing it through Penny.

Through Maz.

Through the Rogue Ghost.

Through the wider AffinityVerse that has been slowly taking shape across books, audio, diaries, podcasts, old continuity, new continuity, and all the strange little doors between them.

That is what made the coincidence so special.

By the time Week 33 reached readers, Penny was arriving in London on the page.

But somehow, a week earlier, I had already been there.

Walking her route.

Taking my own photos.

Chasing a fictional girl through a real city.

And honestly?

That feels very AffinityVerse.

💬 Until Next Time

This was one of those behind-the-scenes experiences that made the story feel unusually close to the real world.

Not because the magic became real.

Sadly.

But because the places did.

The streets.

The landmarks.

The bookish little corner where The London Antiquarian now belongs.

The police box waiting outside Earl’s Court Station like it knew exactly what it was doing.

I’d love to know — have you ever visited a real place because of a story, or had a real place suddenly feel different because of something fictional connected to it?

And if you’ve read Week 33, which London moment stood out to you most?

Stay tuned, stay enchanted, and stay connected!

Warmest Regards,

DB

Share

Leave a comment

Read Penny's Diary

Previous week

Welcome to Penny’s Diary, a contemporary urban-fantasy serial. Read new diary entries every Thursday. Supporting readers can also access a weekly Writer’s Commentary, along with immersive audio and eBook editions, after each entry.

New to Penny’s story? Begin at the very first entry by clicking the button below and step into the moments where everything started to change.

Start at the beginning

Need to catch up?

Read a short guide through Penny’s diary so far — trace what she’s uncovered, what was taken from her, and how the truth keeps slipping out of reach.

Catch Up: The Story So Far

Penny’s Diary stands on its own—but this world holds more stories, waiting when you’re ready.

Explore the AffinityVerse

Saturday, August 22, 2026

Home, But Bruised

I knew I was home because Ellie was asleep with one hand curled into the back of my pajama top.

Also because my hip hurt.

My shoulder hurt.

My wrist had upgraded from bruised to angry purple, and apparently nine hours of sleep does not undo being kidnapped, locked in a tomb, transported across an ocean, involved in an international medicine heist, and dropped behind your Gramps’s cinema by a door that should not exist.

Rude, honestly.

Maz was asleep down the hallway in the purple room.

The Memory Vault, technically, although that status was temporarily suspended for the sleepover.

We had hidden the sensitive evidence before giving her the bed. Ellie and Teddy’s cover was that Maz needed some space, which was close enough to the truth to survive questions.

I stayed still long enough to work out which parts of me could move without complaining. Ellie woke when I shifted anyway.

“Still here,” I said.

She offered painkillers, water, ice, food, coffee, and help getting up in one breath.

I chose coffee because I am brave.

Ellie started apologizing while she helped me sit up. Not properly. Just the beginning of one, her voice going small as she said she should have realized something was wrong when Candy asked to check a photo on her phone.

“Candy used your phone. She did not use you.”

She looked at the finger-shaped bruises around my wrist, which did not exactly support my reassuring speech.

Candy knew Ellie’s name would make me move before my brain caught up. She used our trust and the fact that I would go anywhere if I thought Ellie needed me.

I let Ellie bring the coffee and choose my clothes because lifting my arm had become an extreme sport.

After she helped me change, she kept her hand against my chest for one extra second.

Checking.

Still real.

Still here.

I put my hand over hers.

Accepting help was apparently part of being home too.

Cupcakes and Classified Information

Before heading to Cascades, we checked on Maz.

She was still asleep.

Not pretending. Not resting with one ear open. Properly gone, one arm across the pillow and breathing deeply enough that me and Ellie backed away like waking her might qualify as a crime.

Candy had trained Maz to expect the next threat before the current one finished.

Sleeping properly was new.

We left a note saying we were getting breakfast for all of us.

On the way out, I grabbed a couple more packs of Polaroid film from Gramps’s apparently endless supply in the basement. Apparently, documenting the impossible required bulk purchasing.

Outside the Meridian, Gramps hugged me like someone who knew I had been gone for a week, even though the official version said otherwise.

He did not ask questions.

Neither did I.

Cascades had added salted-caramel cinnamon knots.

Classic.

Felicia stopped to talk to Ellie while we waited. Just family plans, the Meridian opening, and vacation stories.

Normal questions.

Dangerous concept.

Charlotte brought our drinks, the cupcake box for the afternoon diary deep dive, and fresh croissants for our exhausted houseguest. She looked at my wrist once, then politely did not ask.

When we got back, Maz was awake.

Technically.

Her eyes were open. The rest of her had not received the information.

Teddy arrived later with printer ink on one sleeve and the exhausted expression of someone who had already worked half a day before breakfast. He hugged me carefully, then asked us to go through everything again, from the top.

I gave him the useful version.

RG got us out. His last Magic Shot took us to London. The Antiquarian was enormous, impossible, although we kept calling it the bookstore for Teddy’s benefit, and apparently allergic to him specifically.

I explained the Liberium, also called a Magic Wand and therefore what I intended to call it forever. Magic Shots were what powered it. Somewhere around there, my explanation stopped resembling language and reduced Tafarai, the Veiled Sigil, a blood-linked music box, and an international medicine heist to an inconvenient pharmacy visit.

Maz took over and told it properly.

Not Marilyn performing. Not the scared girl Candy had cornered.

A storyteller who made the Antiquarian feel larger and the heist sound like something we had barely survived.

The practical facts were less entertaining.

Jenny was alive, but stable in the adult way that means still in danger. The Medies Flor helped.

It did not cure her.

RG had also stolen a marked Magic Wand because one international crime was apparently insufficient. It got us to the Runeweaver watermill, where Cassandra was still trying to stabilize Jenny.

Teddy caught the name immediately.

“Runeweaver?”

Maz explained the sad part. Ruby had died. Truthweaver had been her original alias. Runeweaver came later, after she was forced to change it, and she had built the new name from Ruby Neve Weaver. RG named the watermill—and their base of operations—Runeweaver in her honor.

It sounded even sadder hearing Maz tell it.

Then there was Holly.

Maz looked at me.

That part was mine.

I slid the Polaroid across the table.

Teddy stopped smiling.

Holly stood alone, her eyes bright with something definitely not normal. Breach! was written across the white border.

Radiance.

Enchanter.

More new words for things we did not understand yet.

Then I told them about the green notebook.

Holly’s warnings in the margins.

Vanessa Colby’s handwriting filling most of the pages.

My aunt had been working with Ruby’s.

With the woman who had saved my life.

Holly had asked her to watch over me.

After Vanessa died saving me, the promise had passed to Ruby.

And after Ruby, it had passed to RG.

I had never met Ruby Weaver.

But she had carried a promise with my name in it.

I told them that part had made me feel guilty.

Like too many people had inherited the job of keeping me alive.

Ellie squeezed my hand.

Teddy said being protected was not the same thing as being a burden.

That landed harder than the heist.

After that, the rest of the photographs felt easier.

I spread our London Polaroids across the table. Ellie kept hold of the Earl’s Court police-box photos. Maz picked up one of her in front of Big Ben.

Teddy picked up one of the Antiquarian.

He stared at it for a second, silently mouthing the name like he was trying to make it stay.

Then he turned the Polaroid face down.

A moment later, his eyes passed over it like he had forgotten why he was holding it in the first place.

Slightly too obviously.

Apparently the bookstore was still allergic to Teddy.

That was when Maz told Teddy and Ellie to call her Maz.

No speech.

No explanation.

Just the name she had chosen.

The Polaroid of me and Maz in the tomb was still with Candy.

Maz showered and changed before heading home. Candy was still away, and I think Maz needed a few hours where nobody asked what happened next.

After she left, Ellie said keeping her half-informed would make us exactly like every adult who had decided ignorance was protection.

Teddy pointed out that telling her about Clearwater meant exposing the Memory Vault, our recovery anchors, Bobby, Truthweaver, and every way the system could be used against us.

We would not recruit Maz or decide what she could handle.

We would tell her enough to understand the danger.

Then she would choose.

The Plan Someone Tore Out

After Maz left, we made sandwiches and restored the Memory Vault to its former diary-chaos glory.

Younger Penny’s fifth diary waited for us.

Ellie held my hand while I touched each page. The memories hit both of us, and she told Teddy what we saw while he recorded it in the Matrix notebook.

For several pages, nothing important happened.

Rain. Hot sunshine. A teacher making Younger Penny redo her lowercase a’s because they looked like tiny potatoes.

Then younger me made a list.

Red ribbon.

Blue chalk.

Logan knows the way.

Three thirty.

It was a plan.

But for what?

The surrounding memories were still childish. School stuff. Noisy kids. Arguments over snacks.

But underneath them was something else.

Younger Penny.

Eleanor.

Logan.

No adults.

Then came another Clearwater weekend.

Several pages had been torn from the binding so carefully that only pale strips remained near the spine.

The plan was never mentioned again.

Younger me wrote about cereal, cartoons, and Mom saying I had slept really well.

After a much-needed sugar break—thank you, cupcakes—Ellie took my hand again, and we finished the diary.

Clearwater threaded through the remaining pages, along with more gaps.

Nothing about Eleanor.

Nothing about Logan.

Then we reached the end of the fifth diary.

The end of everything Younger Penny had left behind.

After this, she never recovered her memories again. Whatever friendship she had found with Logan and Eleanor ended there too.

Her story stopped until I picked it up years later.

The missing pages might have told us what the three of us had been planning.

Ellie kept running her thumbs over the torn edges.

“We were trying to do something.”

She had watched every memory after the plan, but this was the part she came back to.

“And someone made sure we couldn’t find out what happened,” I said.

Someone had read what younger me wrote and decided the paper itself was dangerous.

We had reached the end.

Someone else had made sure the answers had not.

Pizza Rules

Teddy left after six because the Chens were going to Halifax after dinner, staying over, seeing his dad in the morning, and returning for the Meridian Cinema Restaurant opening tomorrow night.

He looked wrecked already.

Regular Teddy wrecked, which somehow made it worse.

Ellie ordered pizza, and I suggested a Doctor Who night since we had missed it last week.

Then we remembered Teddy would probably blow a fuse if we watched another one without him.

Fair.

So I chose one of my old black-and-white comfort movies.

Then I built a couch nest from three blankets, four cushions, and the concentration usually reserved for bomb disposal.

Ellie made sure I ended up in the middle.

Very subtle.

The movie had barely started when Ellie paused it.

She could not stop thinking about the fake message Candy had sent from her phone:

Ellie: Found something out about Candy. Meridia Library. Back steps. Don’t call. Candy is here.

It was not exactly how Ellie would write—but it sounded like her typing fast because something was wrong.

Which was why it worked.

We needed nothing clever enough to forget during an emergency—no rotating password system requiring Teddy and a minor degree in computer science.

If either of us received a message telling us to go somewhere alone, we would ask:

“What movie did we not finish in Willowfen?”

Only we knew the answer.

And no, I am not writing it down here.

If the reply was wrong, delayed, avoided, or missing, we stayed put and sent CODE RED through the RGN app.

Simple.

Private.

Ours.

Ellie looked at me.

“I thought you were dead.”

For hours, I had not answered calls, replied to messages, or been anywhere she knew to look.

I reached for her hand because that was easier than finding the right words.

She moved carefully against me, avoiding my shoulder, and rested her head below my chin.

The movie stayed paused.

The pizza went cold.

Normal did not mean we were unafraid.

It meant we stayed anyway.

Sunday, August 23, 2026

Opening-Day Emergency Glitter

Ellie woke with a jolt and made me jump. She had just realized that the restaurant opening meant missing Doctor Who night for the second week in a row. Clearwater would take next Sunday too.

Apparently, three missed Sundays qualified as a personal attack.

Now she wished we had snuck one in last night.

After I promised we would make up for it after Clearwater, Ellie went to church as usual while I waited for her in the park.

Normally, that would have been the main event before lunch.

Not today.

Today belonged to the Meridian.

Amber fixtures warmed the lobby. Black place cards sat against white cloths, movie posters lined the walls, and the red carpet made old Hollywood look caffeinated.

Underneath that—chaos.

Two servers had called in sick. The reservation list had no table numbers. The florist had sent extra centerpieces and forgotten the entrance display. Someone had placed the press backdrop three feet too far left, which apparently qualified as an adult emergency.

Gramps stood in the middle in a tuxedo, looking far too fancy for someone controlling twelve disasters through eyebrow movement alone.

Ellie looked at me.

I looked at the two empty spaces on the staff list.

We volunteered before Gramps could ask.

Scott found us black-and-gold uniforms with sensible shoes that made volunteering feel suspiciously official. Apparently, saying yes also meant wearing a skirt.

Ellie rescued the entrance display. Two flowers moved, the sign shifted, and “expensive decorations near a door” became “opening-night glamour.”

Rude talent.

Staff asked what Scott meant, Scott asked where Gramps was, Gramps asked whether the press had arrived, and the press asked where Gramps was.

I became a human message service in black and gold.

Our assigned table placed me and Ellie three seats apart among adults who thought networking was an emotion.

No.

For twenty minutes, everything almost worked.

Then the main photographer arrived early, the kitchen printer stopped, the entrance flowers leaned sideways, and someone announced that the first guests were outside.

None of us felt ready.

It was time anyway.

Hollywood Comes to Main Street

The red carpet ran from the curb to the Meridian’s entrance, bordered by gold ropes, flowers, and enough photographers to make crossing the sidewalk feel legally significant.

For half a second, I thought I saw Sapphire Bliss among them.

Then someone moved in front of her.

When I looked again, she was gone.

Probably imagined it.

People gathered behind the barriers. Some had invitations.

Most had phones.

The Meridian sign was lit, the marquee glowed beneath it, and a wide gold ribbon stretched across the entrance.

Gramps stood beside Mayor Horton looking calm enough that nobody would have guessed the restaurant had nearly collapsed under missing servers, leaning flowers, and a printer with personal issues.

Me and Ellie stayed near the doors in our newly invented roles as emergency staff.

Mayor Horton said several polished things about local investment, historic restoration, and the future of Main Street.

Then he introduced Charisma Cavanagh.

She stepped forward in silver and made the rest of us look underlit.

The photographers started before she reached the ribbon.

Charisma accepted the oversized gold scissors, waited exactly long enough for everyone to get the shot, then cut the ribbon.

Applause filled the street.

Camera flashes bounced off the Meridian windows.

For one second, the whole building looked finished.

Successful.

Safe.

Then Scott opened the doors, and everyone tried to enter at once.

Right Names, Wrong Tables

Inside, the Meridian belonged to perfume, camera flashes, polished shoes, and adults pretending they had not spent the last hour asking where the bathrooms were.

I was carrying a tray past the entrance when Mom walked in.

I nearly dropped it.

She had told me she could not make it.

Then surprise.

Rude.

She kissed my cheek and paused at my black-and-gold uniform.

“You’re working?”

“Two servers called in sick.”

Her expression suggested this was somehow my fault.

“You look lovely,” she said anyway.

“You look unexpectedly present.”

She smiled like this counted as affection.

The place cards explained the rest.

Mom had been seated beside Mayor Horton.

Very normal arrangement.

Across the room, Mayor Horton was trying to steer Ellie toward the table and remind her about family photographs while Mom attempted the same with me.

Working meant staying within touching distance without explaining why three seats apart felt ridiculous.

Charisma Cavanagh had the most visible table in the room with her son, Rich “The Dick” Cavanagh, who had thoroughly earned the name.

The Chens arrived soon afterward. Teddy looked tired from Halifax, but less destroyed than he had the night before.

Then came the Dillons.

Sergeant Dillon looked uncomfortable in formal clothes. Steve did not, probably because lifeguard confidence transferred to tailoring. Mrs. Dillon looked glamorous and completely at home.

Then I saw Henry Church near the back with a dark-haired woman I did not recognize.

He looked completely at ease, which was impressive considering his name had last appeared inside a magical watermill connected to my forgotten aunt.

The woman beside him watched the room more carefully than anyone pretending to be ordinary should have.

Candy’s absence should have made everything easier.

It did not.

Isaac Steele arrived with Maz beside him.

She looked perfect. Dark dress. Smooth hair.

Their place cards were at the Baines family’s table.

Isaac headed toward it without checking whether she followed.

She did not.

People noticed Maz, then looked away. One of the snootier women nearly approached before becoming fascinated by a cinema poster.

Maz had a place card.

That was not the same as having a place.

Every table was filled with families and people who knew where they belonged.

Maz stood among them like sitting down required permission no one had given her.

The Seat Beside Steve

Steve noticed Maz before anyone else did anything useful.

That was the important part.

Not after someone whispered or asked whether there was a seating problem. Before Maz could disappear until dinner ended.

Steve saw her standing alone and pushed out the empty chair beside him.

“You can sit here.”

Maz stared at him.

For one second, Marilyn stayed in place. Chin up. Shoulders straight. Perfectly capable of surviving alone and making everyone else feel unreasonable for noticing.

Steve gestured again.

Sergeant Dillon did not object. Mrs. Dillon shifted a water glass to make space. Nobody announced it as public kindness.

Which was probably why Maz moved.

She crossed the room with every eye pretending not to follow and sat beside Steve.

Maz almost smiled.

From across the room, they looked like two people having an ordinary conversation.

Both knew what it was like when Candy shaped your choices and everyone blamed the result.

They did not need to explain that over dinner.

The room settled. Plates arrived. The kitchen printer survived.

Then Gramps stood near the small stage.

His welcome was brief because he understood speeches were mostly obstacles between people and food. He thanked Scott, the staff, Chen Print, the builders, and everyone who had helped turn an old idea into a real place.

“August twenty-third has always meant something to me. Forty-three years ago today, my wife and I took over the Meridian.”

Apparently Gramps had carried an entire anniversary through opening-day chaos without mentioning it.

Then he looked toward me.

“This was always supposed to feel like somewhere people could come home to.”

Mayor Horton clapped first. Mom smiled. Scott looked ready to cry or check the kitchen.

Amber lights. Movie posters. Curved booths filled with families, officials, celebrities, servers, and people who would complain about parking tomorrow.

For once, the Meridian was not where we hid diaries, recovered erased memories, or waited for impossible doors.

It was Gramps’s restaurant.

His cinema.

The place he and Grandma had made theirs forty-three years ago.

I let myself feel completely proud of him.

For the whole length of the applause.

Monday, August 24, 2026

After the Applause

Monday started late.

Opening night had stretched past midnight before the last guests left and Gramps stopped finding things to check.

After my shower, while Ellie took hers, I went downstairs.

The red carpet was gone.

So was most of the glamour.

The lobby held stacked chairs, cleaning buckets, half-dead flowers, and Scott beside the reservation desk with three coffees and the expression of a man who had survived success and already regretted Tuesday.

Gramps sat in a booth going through the first week’s bookings while pretending he had not nearly fallen asleep over them.

I hugged him again, for nothing in particular other than being him.

My ribs still hurt when I moved wrong. Candy’s bruises had reached the unpleasant yellow stage, which made them look less dramatic and more real.

Candy was still away.

The Polaroid of me and Maz in the tomb was still with her.

Before Maz left last night, we had asked her to return that afternoon.

That gave everyone time to sleep, recover, eat lunch, and pretend one major emotional decision could be improved by sandwiches.

The Choice, Not the Invitation

Teddy arrived shortly before two.

Maz came ten minutes later.

We stayed in the living room.

That mattered.

The Memory Vault was only a few steps away, behind a closed door, but taking her straight inside would have made the decision for her. She needed to understand what the door meant first.

Teddy hesitated when I said we should tell Maz everything.

He did not think Maz was lying to us. Apparently, that was still several levels below access to absolutely everything in Teddy’s trust system.

Ellie was quieter about it, but I knew she understood his point.

Maz had already seen enough that pretending none of this existed was impossible. I still thought deciding how much further she went had to be hers.

We started with the part hardest to explain without sounding completely unhinged.

So we showed her.

I opened my diary and touched one of the pages.

The memory blast hit, and black veins spread beneath my eyes before fading.

Maz stopped with her iced coffee halfway to her mouth.

“That happens every time?”

I nodded.

Then Ellie took my hand, and I touched the page again. This time the blast hit both of us, black veins spreading beneath both our eyes.

This did not reassure her.

Teddy gave her the practical version of Clearwater. The treatments. The resets. Memories softened, moved, or replaced with something easier for everyone else to live with.

I told Maz that during the last reset, Clearwater had changed Ellie from my girlfriend into a friend staying in the spare room.

“And you both believed it?”

“For a while,” Ellie said.

We explained the Memory Vault, Bobby, the Matrix, and Truthweaver, which could find things normal searches could not but still needed evidence before we trusted it.

Then the recovery anchors: my letters, Ellie’s dragon, and Teddy’s blue box.

Objects and messages designed to tell us who we were if Clearwater edited the answer again.

We answered honestly, including when the answer was that we did not know.

That felt important.

We could not promise Candy would never use the tomb photograph.

We could not promise joining us would make Maz safer.

Once she knew everything, she could not return to merely suspecting the adults around her were lying.

This was not friendship with a secret handshake and matching accessories.

It was a choice about whether she wanted help remembering something the world might decide she was better without.

Maz looked toward the closed door.

Then at me.

“Do you want to remember?”

“I need to think about it.”

No one tried to change her mind.

We agreed to meet back at the apartment after lunch tomorrow.

Maz went home with the question still hers.

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Her Answer

Mom called before breakfast.

Which was weird enough on its own.

She had returned for the Meridian opening and to sort out things at home, but Halifax apparently needed her for a few more days.

She asked me to meet her at Cascades tomorrow morning.

For hot chocolate.

She had something important to discuss but would not explain over the phone, which was very Mom. Enough information to make me worry. Not enough to do anything useful with it.

I immediately decided she was going to make me move home because my brain enjoys preparing for the worst before breakfast.

Then she reminded me to keep the apartment clean and not distract Gramps while the restaurant was busy.

Of course she did.

Teddy arrived before lunch and took over the desk to finish the BNB website.

Ellie’s eye-stamp logo turned slowly on my screen, looking uncanny, hypnotic, and probably bad for responsible decision-making.

Between them, Teddy and Ellie had built something disturbingly professional while I was in London.

I felt slightly guilty—then I remembered why I had been in London.

Blame Candy.

Ellie reorganized notes while I pretended not to check the time every thirty seconds.

Maz arrived just after one.

We had given her a choice.

Choices only counted when saying no was still allowed.

“I want to remember.”

No buildup.

No speech prepared for maximum effect.

Just her answer.

Then she added, “I’m done letting other people decide what Marilyn is allowed to know. Maz gets to decide.”

She wanted access to the Memory Vault, everything we knew, and an anchor in case someone took it away again.

Ellie asked if she was sure.

Maz said no.

I think that was the most honest answer she could have given.

There was no welcome speech.

No congratulations.

Teddy closed the BNB laptop. Ellie stood beside me. I opened the hallway door, but I did not walk ahead.

Maz passed me.

She entered the Memory Vault first.

The Full Version

Maz had been inside the purple room before.

She had slept there after London.

But then it contained a bed, a window seat, and enough cleared space to pretend it was still a bedroom.

This was different.

Everything else had come back.

Bobby covered half the wall. Diaries, photographs, handwritten notes, printed pages, red string, labels, and evidence competed for space like the room had stopped pretending to be normal.

Maz stayed near the door.

“You hid all of this?”

“We made it look less alarming.”

Teddy glanced at Bobby.

“Marginally.”

We showed her what mattered.

My letters.

Ellie’s dragon.

Teddy’s blue box.

The Matrix and the Web connecting people, places, and stories that refused to stay separate.

Truthweaver remained closed while Teddy explained the rule: useful did not mean trustworthy.

Then Ellie took Jemma’s drawing and the missing flyer from Bobby and handed them to Maz.

She looked at them.

Nothing changed in her face.

“You knew her,” I said.

Maz looked at me.

“Her name was Jemma Landry. She was part of Candy’s group.”

Probably trapped inside it, like everyone else.

At first, Jemma had been missing.

Posters. Search parties. Half the town looking for her.

Then Clearwater happened.

After that, the flyers disappeared. The searches had never happened. Nobody remembered Jemma had existed.

Only my memories came back.

We told Maz about Jemma’s ghost.

About Henry Church using a ghost box—because apparently that was the official name now—to trap her after the rest of the town had forgotten she even existed.

Maz looked back at Ellie’s drawing.

At the face of someone she had known and could no longer remember.

“Just like your Aunt Holly,” she said.

There was no useful answer to that.

Then we reached Steve Dillon.

We told Maz Candy had wanted a date with him and we had tried to use that to collect evidence against her.

Steve agreed to help.

Then the plan backfired spectacularly.

Teddy played the part of the recording that mattered.

Candy’s eyes began to sparkle.

RG had called it Radiance.

Which meant Candy was an Enchanter.

We did not know everything that meant.

We knew she had magic and knew how to use it.

Teddy skipped the most private part, then played the end, when Candy’s dad congratulated her like what she had done was an achievement.

We made the distinction clear.

Steve had chosen to help Candy before the Radiance. He had followed instructions, hidden things from us, and helped set the trap.

That did not disappear.

But Candy had interfered with how much of what happened afterward was still his choice.

Steve knew nothing about the Memory Vault, Bobby, Truthweaver, the anchors, or what we were showing Maz.

She watched Candy’s face frozen on the screen, eyes still bright.

“He agreed before that?”

We nodded.

“But after?”

None of us had a clean answer.

We gave Maz the same explanation we had already given ourselves.

The tape had stayed inside the Memory Vault because taking it to Sergeant Dillon was not a real option. It showed Steve helping Candy before she used magic on him, which meant it could expose his original involvement without proving where his choices stopped being his.

Showing it could also warn Isaac Steele that we had evidence and trigger whatever Candy was still holding over Steve—and over Ellie.

The tape proved Candy had used Steve to control his dad.

It did not give us a safe way to expose what had happened without making things worse.

Teddy installed the RGN app on her phone and explained the emergency rules.

We also gave Maz and Teddy our new phone-verification question and its unwritten answer.

Nothing about that went in my diary, on a phone, or onto Bobby.

The worst thing we showed Maz was not that Steve had helped Candy.

It was that Candy had found a way to interfere with how much of that help was still his choice.

The Place She Chose Maz

After we showed Maz the room, we explained what her recovery anchor needed to do.

It had to be personal. Something Maz would recognize even if she forgot why it mattered.

I tore two blank pages from the back of this diary and placed them on the desk.

Maz studied them, then asked for the London Polaroids.

I had tucked them inside the diary.

A red bus. Buckingham Palace. Big Ben. Me beside a police box like I had personally arranged for it to be there.

The usual tourist evidence.

Maz went through them slowly and stopped at the one with Big Ben behind her.

“That one.”

She had been looking toward it from the café when she told me she wanted to be called Maz.

Not Marilyn.

Not the version Candy expected or the one her mother and Isaac had planned.

Just Maz.

Using one of Ellie’s pencils, she drew Big Ben on the first page.

Clock face.

Tower.

Sharp roofline.

Simple enough to recognize.

Then she copied it exactly onto the second.

Two matching anchors.

One would stay with her. The other would go in the window-seat cache beside the backups that had already helped bring Ellie and Teddy back.

I turned both sheets over and wrote the same message on each:

M, I really wish this could bring you back to me. P

Maz read it once, her fingers resting against the paper’s edge.

I took a Polaroid of her holding one of the finished Big Ben anchors.

On Thursday, she would join us for pre-Clearwater pie at Cascades. Afterward, once everything had settled, she would write herself a letter and record a short video.

No one else would decide what went into either.

That mattered.

This was not us creating a better version of Marilyn.

It was Maz leaving a trail back to herself.

She placed one Big Ben drawing with the backup anchors, then folded the matching copy carefully and kept it.

Like He Disappeared

We took a break after the anchors, made iced coffees, and carried them back into the Memory Vault.

Maz was quiet while we drank them.

Then she asked the question the Seven Trees tape had left behind.

“Why did my stepdad need Sergeant Dillon out of town?”

Teddy looked toward Bobby, ready to reenact his Saturday stakeout.

Maz followed his gaze and noticed the Baines Goldsmiths heading.

“What happened there?”

Teddy cleared his throat and gave her the short version.

The robbery.

The names attached to it.

The parts that still did not fit.

Maz kept looking at the board.

Then she said her dad’s name.

Michael Moreau had been convicted of robbing that same Baines Goldsmiths store at gunpoint.

Maz said he had been framed.

Not that she suspected it—she knew it.

Once she started talking, it was like the floodgates had finally found the right people.

While awaiting trial, Michael’s bail conditions barred him from Meridia Falls. The robbery, witnesses, and case were here, and the prosecution claimed he might interfere.

He came anyway.

Not to threaten anyone.

Not to destroy evidence.

Not for revenge.

He came to Seven Trees Farm to see his daughter.

Candy had the security footage.

Worse, she had edited it.

Her version made Michael look like he had entered town secretly and broken into Seven Trees to confront the man who had stolen his wife and family.

Angry.

Violent.

Exactly the man the prosecution already claimed he was.

If Candy gave it to the police, it would not look like a father risking everything to see his daughter. It would look like proof he had broken his bail conditions for revenge.

Enough to damage an appeal.

Enough to destroy any realistic chance of parole.

Enough to make every other accusation sound believable.

Candy had threatened to release it if Maz stopped cooperating.

That was how she worked.

Sometimes she took the truth, removed the parts that mattered, and gave everyone the version they were already prepared to believe.

Maz had stayed in regular contact with her dad after he went to prison. She had even taken Law as an elective because understanding the system felt better than waiting for it to crush him.

Then more robberies were attached to his name.

More charges.

More time.

Maz believed those had been pinned on him too.

Recently, the calls stopped.

The prison said he had been transferred, but every answer led to another office, another number, or another person who suddenly could not tell her anything.

“I can’t find him,” she said.

Her voice stayed level.

“It’s like he disappeared.”

That was when I admitted we had already searched Michael Moreau’s name.

At first, we found nothing.

No old news reports. No court records. Not even the basic case details that should have been public.

It was like someone had removed him from the internet.

Truthweaver found the missing articles and court records, plus barely enough recent information to prove he still existed inside the system.

That was all.

For a second, I thought Maz might snap.

She did not.

She looked hurt that we had searched without asking.

Fair.

Teddy glanced toward the closed laptop.

Truthweaver could point toward hidden things.

It could also give us half an answer wearing a convincing hat.

For the first time since Maz entered the Memory Vault, the room was not showing her one of our secrets.

It was holding one of hers.

Her phone lit up.

Steve.

Are you okay after Sunday?

Maz read it aloud without realizing, then locked the screen and put the phone away.

I did not comment.

“We might be able to find your dad,” Teddy said. “But it might not be quickly.”

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

The Practical Arrangement

I met Mom at Cascades as arranged.

It was weird being there without Ellie.

Normal Mom news arrived through texts containing too many bullet points. Serious Mom news involved hot chocolate and sitting opposite each other.

That was how I knew this was serious.

Also, Mom did not usually summon me for good news. Good news appeared accidentally between reminders about laundry, school, and eating an actual vegetable.

So I prepared for the you have to move back home right now demand.

I was not ready for the truth.

Mom had been promoted to Regional Treatments Manager.

The new role meant more branches, more travel, and more time in Halifax pretending phrases like regional consistency were exciting. It was also why she had come back early.

She needed to decide what happened next with me.

Apparently, what happened next was the Meridian.

Mom had already spoken to Gramps.

I could keep living in the apartment.

Not until the end of August.

Not until she came back.

Actually stay.

She said it made practical sense. Gramps was across the shared hallway, I was settled, school was close, and pretending I lived at home while she was barely there would be inconvenient for everyone.

(Translation: Mom had already solved my entire living situation before I knew there was a problem.)

Then she told me she had spoken to Mayor Horton.

Ellie could stay too.

Officially.

As long as Gramps remained responsible for us, we kept up with school, and the Meridian did not become what Mayor Horton called an unsupervised teenage hotel.

Rude.

Also fair.

I stared long enough that Mom asked whether I had heard her.

I had—that was the problem.

The apartment had started as temporary. Then it became mine. Then Ellie moved in for the summer.

Now our parents had approved the life we had been protecting and turned it into something ordinary.

For one perfect second, I pictured Ellie’s bag staying beside mine without anyone asking when she was moving out.

Then another thought arrived.

What if Ellie did not want permanent?

Staying because everything was dangerous was different from choosing to live together. Mayor Horton agreeing did not mean Ellie had.

I would have to ask her.

Preferably without sounding like I had already planned where all her socks would live.

Mom moved on to practical details. Keys. Meals. School mornings. Checking in when she traveled. Looking after the house and mail when she was away.

I nodded in the right places.

She did not know she had just given us the Memory Vault, each other, and a home no reset could explain away as easily.

Or maybe she knew more than she was saying.

The thought came too quickly.

Mom never gave me news this good without something hidden behind it.

I watched her.

She was explaining grocery money.

Very Mom.

I pushed the suspicion aside.

For now.

Mom called it the most sensible arrangement.

I called it the possibility of Ellie’s bag staying beside mine permanently.

Somehow, our temporary life had become official.

Start With What We Know

The Meridian was booked for the rest of the week and well into the next two.

Gramps looked tired and delighted.

I hugged him and thanked him for letting me stay permanently.

He said it was my home.

Which nearly made me hug him again.

Upstairs, Ellie was sorting laundry into piles that followed rules only she understood.

I told her about Mom’s promotion and that everything had already been arranged with Gramps.

The apartment was officially mine.

Then I told her the other part.

Mom had spoken to Mayor Horton. He had agreed Ellie could stay permanently too.

If she wanted to.

That part came out faster than everything else.

“You want me to?”

I tried not to answer too quickly.

“Yes.”

She smiled.

“Then yes.”

Apparently, moving in permanently required fewer negotiations than deciding which side of the closet belonged to whom.

By the time Teddy and Maz arrived, Ellie’s answer felt official enough for us.

Teddy said it made sense. Maz said the apartment already looked like both of us lived there.

Fair.

Maz looked less like the Memory Vault had personally attacked her than she had yesterday.

Before we started, she told us she had met Steve at Cascades.

He admitted Candy had things she could use against him but did not say what.

Maz told him she understood Candy had controlled more than people realized.

Herself included.

She did not mention the Memory Vault. She only told him she was friends with us now, thanked him for helping us, and said she was sorry that dealing with Candy had become something he could no longer fully control.

Apparently, the friends part made him look happier.

Then Teddy opened a fresh Matrix page and wrote:

MICHAEL MOREAU — START WITH FACTS

He separated what Maz remembered from what Michael had told her, what Candy claimed, what Isaac implied, what her mom said, and what the recovered records showed.

Then he added anything we might eventually be able to hold.

Footage.

Paperwork.

Visitor logs.

Maz studied the headings.

“You think I got some of it wrong.”

Teddy stopped writing.

He said the point was not to prove her wrong. We needed everything separated before using Truthweaver so we could see what it confirmed, contradicted, or invented.

Truthweaver was not proof.

We were recording Maz’s story because something might twist or alter it later.

Especially after Clearwater.

Maz looked at the columns again.

Then she nodded.

“Start with what we know.”

So we did.

Someone Missing of Her Own

Maz and Teddy were still working through Michael Moreau’s records when Ellie went quiet.

Not normal quiet.

The kind where she stopped looking at anyone and held herself too still.

“I need a minute.”

She left the Memory Vault. I followed her into the living room, where she stood by the window watching the street.

“My mom isn’t the same as Maz’s dad.”

“I know.”

“She wasn’t in prison. Candy didn’t threaten me with her. I don’t even know if anyone lied about where she went.”

I waited.

“But if we’re making a list of people whose official story might be wrong…”

She looked toward the closed Vault door.

“My mom belongs on it.”

December 24, 2024.

Ellie’s birthday.

The day her mother disappeared.

I wanted to promise we would find her.

Something huge and useful and impossible.

So I did not.

I took a Post-it note and wrote:

MOLLY HORTON — DECEMBER 24, 2024

Ellie looked at the words, then took the note.

Back in the Memory Vault, Teddy and Maz were arranging Michael Moreau’s timeline across Bobby.

They stopped when Ellie placed her mom’s note beside it.

Not underneath.

Beside it.

Then she took out a photograph of herself when she was younger, smiling while her mom leaned close.

Same red hair.

Same eyes.

The kind of picture that looked ordinary until you knew one of them had vanished.

Ellie pinned it next to the Post-it note.

We did not add erased, taken, magic, or Clearwater.

Possibilities were not proof.

While Teddy and Maz returned to Michael’s timeline, me and Ellie opened the Matrix notebook.

We recorded what she remembered, what her dad had told her, what the family believed, what happened on December 24, 2024, and everything that should have existed afterward but apparently did not.

Maz watched Ellie longer than the photograph.

She did not say she understood.

She only shifted part of Michael’s timeline aside so Molly Horton had more room.

That was enough.

Until then, Ellie’s mom had been something that happened to her.

A space in the family no one knew how to name.

Now Molly Horton had a photograph on Bobby, a heading, and a place to begin.

Thursday, August 27, 2026

Stable, Not Cured

We had a slow start.

Yesterday had felt like we were surviving entirely on investigative energy.

Ellie seemed different after adding her mom to Bobby.

Not better exactly.

But lighter.

Like deciding to look for the truth had moved some of the weight somewhere she could see it.

She caught me staring while she was getting changed.

I went so red she started laughing.

Which made me laugh.

For one moment, I was completely happy—then Clearwater entered my head.

Rude.

We were eating lunch on the couch when RG called through the RGN app.

Ellie nearly dropped her sandwich.

RG did not call often. Apparently, using his last Magic Shot to rescue us from a tomb and strand us in London was fine, but an ordinary phone call required something important.

Jenny was stable.

Not cured.

The Medies Flor had bought her time, and Cassandra was still treating her at the Runeweaver.

RG’s voice changed when he talked about Jenny.

Only slightly.

Like he was concentrating very hard on sounding less terrified than he was.

Cassandra believed the treatment was holding.

For now.

RG was also working on a permanent doorway between the Runeweaver and Meridia Falls.

The general term was a Traverse.

This kind was called a Porta Traverse.

Personally, I preferred magic door.

He said it would let him reach us more reliably if something happened.

I pointed out that it would also let us reach him.

There was a pause.

Hopefully the door also came with another get-out-of-jail-free piece of notebook paper.

He did not explain how the Traverse would work.

He definitely did not mention Gramps.

All we had was the promise of a permanent doorway connecting the Runeweaver to Meridia Falls.

Useful.

Still a doorway.

And permanent routes worked in both directions.

Pie Is a Protocol

Cascades had our upstairs booth free.

I am choosing to believe this was fate and not Charlotte seeing us arrive and deciding nobody else deserved the paperwork.

We ordered pie.

Pecan for me.

Cherry for Ellie.

Apple for Teddy.

Lemon meringue for Maz.

She looked at the four plates.

“Is pie part of the memory protocol?”

“No,” Teddy said.

“Yes,” Ellie said.

“It is spiritually mandatory,” I said.

Maz tried the lemon meringue and stopped questioning our methods.

The point of pre-Clearwater pie was pretending we were not terrified.

Tomorrow, me and Ellie were leaving.

Teddy and Maz were staying.

Saturday night, they would fall asleep knowing they might wake with different memories and no idea what had been taken. Then they would have to use everything we had prepared to find their way back.

Completely reassuring.

So we did not spend the whole time dwelling on it.

We talked about the Meridian. Starting our final year of school. Whether Meridia Falls planned to get any rain before becoming a desert.

Normal things.

Or our version of them.

I took out the Polaroid camera to take a photo and preserve the moment.

Teddy told me not to cut off half his face.

Maz said it might improve the picture.

He looked offended and jabbed her lightly in the side.

They both laughed.

The photograph slid out.

We placed it in the middle of the table and waited.

All four of us, slowly coming into focus.

Copies of Ourselves

Back at the Meridian, we turned the Memory Vault into a makeshift recording studio.

Letters covered the desk. Phones charged beside them. The Cascades Polaroid rested on the bed, all four of us happy and together.

I prepared my letters while Teddy and Ellie updated theirs and added to their videos.

Then it was Maz’s turn.

She seemed far too amused by the camcorder. Apparently, leaving a message for your future self became less terrifying when the equipment looked like it belonged in an old movie.

I gave her blank pages from the back of my diary.

Then me, Ellie, and Teddy left the room so Maz could decide what she wanted to write and say without us listening.

No one else would choose which version of her deserved preserving.

When she finished, I asked her to hold the letter and my diary while I took a Polaroid, just as I had with Teddy and Ellie.

The tradition mattered.

Proof the words belonged to her.

Proof this version of Maz had existed before anyone tried to replace her.

Then we cleared Bobby.

The BNB material stayed because the purple room needed a reason to contain a giant board covered in notes.

Everything else came down.

Michael Moreau.

Molly Horton.

Aunt Holly and Vanessa Colby.

Radiance and Enchanters.

Traverse. Liberium. The Medies Flor.

Every question, photograph, heading, and Post-it note we wanted protected went into the window-seat cache with the letters, videos, backup anchors, and one copy of Maz’s Big Ben drawing.

The ruined help paper went in too.

It was useless now, but throwing away something that had once saved us felt wrong. Apparently, I was going to have to avoid getting trapped in any more tombs.

The Truthweaver laptop stayed out.

Teddy was taking it home because one of Ruby’s search worms was still looking for buried records connected to Maz’s dad. He would bring it back tomorrow and cache it before me and Ellie left for Clearwater.

By the time we finished, the Memory Vault had disappeared again.

The purple room had returned.

Tomorrow night, me and Ellie were leaving for Clearwater.

We had done everything we could to make sure the right people came back.

That was not the same as control.

Before We Changed

We waited until Teddy and Maz had gone and the apartment was quiet.

Then we retrieved the black light from the window seat.

The now-traditional final skin check.

Very romantic.

Ellie turned her back to me first and lifted her shirt just enough.

I passed the light over her lower back and then her chest and wrists.

No glowing triangles.

No hidden marks beneath her skin.

Only the three tiny punctures that had never gone away.

Then she checked me.

Same.

The glowing triangles had faded—the needle marks remained.

Clearwater apparently believed in leaving souvenirs.

We returned the light to the cache and closed the window seat.

That was it.

No more checks.

No more letters.

No more making copies of ourselves in case the originals disappeared.

Tomorrow evening, Ellie’s dad’s driver would take us to Clearwater.

Early Sunday morning, the reset would come.

And whatever woke up afterward might remember this room differently.

Might remember us differently.

I looked at Ellie.

She was still holding the edge of my shirt where she had lowered it.

Neither of us moved for a moment.

Then she kissed me.

Not like we were proving anything.

Not like one of us had just returned from somewhere dangerous.

Just because she wanted to.

I kissed her back.

This was our last night before Clearwater.

Maybe our last night before the world decided we were different people again.

So we did not want to spend it being afraid.

We wanted to spend it together.

And for one night, that was enough.

Friday, August 28, 2026

One Last Normal Morning

Me and Ellie woke before the alarm.

Neither of us mentioned Clearwater.

We made breakfast slowly.

Toast. Fruit. Coffee for me and orange juice for Ellie.

Nothing ceremonial.

Nothing involving memory recovery, hidden evidence, or the possibility of waking up as different people.

Just breakfast while the Meridian came to life beneath us.

Afterward, we mailed the backup letter like usual.

Then Ellie suggested Cascades.

Apparently, mailing something capable of restoring my identity required frappes.

I did not argue.

We carried them through the park instead of heading straight back. The morning was warm and quiet, with dog walkers and someone setting up near the bandstand.

Everything looked completely normal from a distance.

Meridia Falls had become very talented at that.

Once we were far enough from the Meridian that nobody was watching, Ellie took my hand.

We took the long way around the lake.

On the way back, both our phones vibrated.

A message in the RGN group chat.

Teddy: Big news. Everyone to the Memory Vault. Now.

Have You Seen This Woman?

Teddy and Maz arrived seconds after we got home.

He had seen her sprinting down Main Street and picked her up in the print shop van.

Teddy carried the Truthweaver laptop into the purple room and opened it.

For one second, I thought he had found Michael Moreau.

Maz did too. I saw it in the way she leaned forward.

Then Teddy turned the screen toward Ellie.

The page was plain.

Black background.

White text.

No logo. No name. Nothing explaining who had made it or why.

Only one heading:

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?

Below it were six photographs of red-haired women.

At first, I thought they were sisters.

Then I looked properly.

Same face.

Exactly.

But different hair. Different clothes. One wore glasses.

Different names.

Different towns.

Different provinces.

• Erin Calloway—Wolfville, Nova Scotia

• Rebecca Sloan—Kingston, Ontario

• Tessa Milne—Nelson, British Columbia

• Claire Donnelly—Banff, Alberta

• Naomi Keating—Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

• Julia Penrose—St. Andrews, New Brunswick

Every listing ended with the same date:

MISSING: DECEMBER 24, 2024

Ellie stopped beside me.

Teddy gave us the smallest useful version.

While Ruby’s search worm worked through the buried Michael Moreau records, he had run another for Ellie’s mom.

It found an old missing-person reference behind a route normal searches could not reach. That led to a dead link, then this page.

He did not know who owned it or whether it was trying to find the women, warn people about them, or simply track them.

There were no family appeals.

No police numbers.

Only a reward for information leading to any of them.

Beneath it was a QR code with no explanation of where it led.

Teddy said scanning it might tell whoever owned the page exactly who had found it. We needed time to process everything, check whether the code could be opened safely, and decide whether responding was worth the risk.

Especially with me and Ellie leaving for Clearwater in a few hours.

I made Teddy promise not to scan it while we were gone, just in case.

The names had to be aliases—different identities belonging to the same woman.

Molly Horton could have been another one.

“They all look like her,” Maz said quietly.

Ellie moved closer to the screen.

She did not look at me.

She only stared at the six versions of the same face.

“They look like my mom.”

The Same Face

For a few minutes, no one moved.

Ellie stared at the photographs until I touched her arm.

She did not react at first. Then she stepped back from the desk and sat on the bed.

I sat beside her.

Six women.

Same face.

Six aliases.

Different names, towns, and provinces.

All went missing on December 24, 2024.

Ellie’s birthday.

There was no normal explanation.

The search had stopped being about whether her mom’s official story was wrong.

It had become something worse.

Ellie stayed quiet until her breathing slowed.

Then she asked whether she should tell her dad.

Her second question was Felicia.

The order probably said more than she meant it to.

No one answered for her.

The page might have been a warning, a list, or bait. Clearwater was only hours away, and Ellie could be gone before her family had even finished reacting.

“I’m not keeping it from them,” she said. “I’m just keeping it safe until I know what it is.”

That was her decision.

Not ours.

Teddy took screenshots and printed every photograph.

We opened the window-seat cache again.

I took Polaroids of each face and the QR code on the screen. Maz copied the names and locations into the Matrix. Ellie recorded the site address and every step of Teddy’s Truthweaver search route.

Digital.

Printed.

Handwritten.

Polaroid.

Apparently, paranoia worked best in several formats.

Maz had gone quiet when Teddy first showed us the page. For a few seconds, I think she had believed he had found her father.

Teddy apologized that the search worm had not led to Michael Moreau.

Maz shook her head.

“You found this.”

She looked at the screen.

“You can find him too.”

Once everything was preserved, we placed the printed photographs, handwritten notes, the Matrix, Polaroid, and finally the Truthweaver laptop inside the cache.

Almost Clearwater

Mayor Horton’s driver was on the way.

That made the countdown official.

I checked the letter on my bedside table one last time. It was exactly where after-Clearwater me would see it.

Assuming she still understood why the letter deserved more trust than whatever Clearwater put in her head.

Ellie stood beside the window seat.

She said she was fine.

She was not even slightly fine.

Her arms were folded tightly, and she kept looking toward the hidden cache like she could see the photographs through the wood.

Six women with the same face.

Six wrong names.

All missing on Ellie’s birthday.

And all of them looked like her mom.

There had barely been time for any of it to become real before we had to leave.

Now Ellie had to carry it into the place that had already changed what she remembered about me.

A place that might change what she remembered about her mom too.

There was nothing useful I could say.

So I took her hand.

We arranged to meet Teddy and Maz at Cascades at noon on Monday. Their recovery anchors would be hidden where they could find them that morning, but not before.

Apparently, even recovering your own life required scheduling.

Teddy drove Maz home in the print shop van. They both hugged us before they left.

Then it was just me and Ellie.

She is sitting behind me while I write this final entry.

Every so often, I hear her move.

Every so often, I reach back until she takes my hand.

When I finish, I will hide this diary behind the AC vent in my old bedroom.

Again.

Then I will wait for the driver with Ellie.

I have to trust the letter and diary will bring me back. That the dragon will bring Ellie back. That Teddy and Maz will find their anchors at the right time.

That everything else will remain inside the window seat.

Ellie kissed the back of my neck and rested her forehead between my shoulder blades.

Clearwater was waiting.

I tightened my fingers around hers.

Clearwater had already tried to turn me and Ellie into different people before.

Now we were going back with six versions of her mom’s face hidden inside the window seat.

And neither of us knew which truth Clearwater would try to take first.

Next week

Diary index

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. There’s more to come.

If you’d like to talk about this diary entry, you’re welcome to share your thoughts in the chat.

Stay tuned, stay enchanted, and stay connected!

Warmest Regards,

DB

🗝️ Supporting Reader Content

The Affinity Web Chronicles is a reader-supported publication. You can subscribe for free to receive new fiction every Thursday, along with regular updates.

Supporting readers unlock an exclusive Writer’s Commentary, immersive audio, and eBook editions, and help make stories like Penny’s Diary possible.

Subscribe now

Read more

August has been one of those months where everything seems to be happening at once — writing, travel, family time, new discoveries, and more than a few moments where the AffinityVerse has felt especially alive.

The past couple of weeks of Penny’s Diary have also been some of my favorite entries to write so far. Taking Penny away from her usual surroundings was something I had been looking forward to for a long time, and Week 33 in particular was one I was incredibly excited to finally reach. I won’t spoil it here in case you haven’t read it yet, but it was one of those moments where a lot of planning suddenly became real on the page.

There’s plenty to catch up on this month, from the next phase of Penny’s mystery to castles, gardens, wildlife, books, movies, and a Dalek that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

As always, thank you to everyone who continues to read, listen, comment, and follow along. It’s been wonderful seeing people experience this new version of Penny’s story, and I’m excited to share where the next chapters take us.

If you’re new here, welcome! I send a Workbench Update each month — partly how the writing’s going, partly a look at what’s happening behind the scenes, partly a family photo album. Consider it a letter from where I sit, to where you sit, with AffinityVerse news, things I’ll be doing soon, and now and then a castle or a Dalek.

👉 Just joined?
Penny’s Diary is a really good place to start — a weekly, character-driven mystery unfolding one entry at a time.

👉 Want to explore more of the AffinityVerse?
If Penny’s Diary has sparked your curiosity, there’s a whole world waiting beyond its pages. The Rogue Ghost Podcast opens the door to the larger AffinityVerse — a globe-spanning mystery built around magic, history, and the long shadows cast by twelve Puzzle Boxes. Explore at your own pace and discover how these stories quietly connect.

🌍 Global Update

A small continuity update this month.

I realized I had forgotten to include a moment in Week 32 where Ellie buys Penny a black pendant while they are in Willowfen. I’ve now added that moment back into Week 32 in all versions, so the story properly reflects when Penny first received it.

I especially wanted to mention this because it carries forward into the expanded PDF editions of the following weeks, where Penny can be seen wearing the pendant in the Polaroids and other visual material.

It is only a small addition, but one of those little continuity details that becomes much more noticeable once the story starts extending beyond the written page.

🔧 What I’m Working On Right Now

Right now, I’m working through the September cycle of Penny’s Diary, covering Weeks 35 through 38.

This has been a really interesting section to write because it explores what happens after the immediate crisis. The characters are still carrying everything that came before, but life does not stop just because you have unanswered questions.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about this cycle is watching the group settle into a slightly different rhythm. Penny, Ellie, Teddy, and now Maz are still trying to understand what has happened to them, but they are also figuring out what comes next — school, family, friendships, and the future waiting beyond Grade 12.

The mystery continues to grow, but so does the focus on the people at the center of it. Sometimes the biggest discoveries do not come from searching somewhere new. Sometimes they come from looking more closely at the things, places, and people that have been there all along.

This is a part where the past begins to feel much closer to the present, and I’ve really enjoyed exploring that balance between uncovering answers and simply letting the characters have moments where they can just be themselves.

📘 What’s Coming Up Next

The next Penny’s Diary entry to arrive will be Week 34 on August 27, 2026.

After everything that happened in London, Penny is finally back in Meridia Falls — but returning home does not mean returning to normal.

Week 34 is about choices, trust, and what happens when the circle around Penny begins to widen. New truths are shared, old mysteries are given fresh attention, and questions that once belonged to individual characters start becoming part of something much larger.

There are quieter changes too: home begins to mean something different, relationships shift, and the group starts building new ways to protect the things they cannot afford to lose.

But with Clearwater approaching again, one final discovery threatens to reshape everything they thought they understood — and leaves Penny and Ellie heading into the reset with far more at stake than either of them expected.

And here are a few Polaroids from the expanded PDF version, offering a sneak peek at some of the moments waiting in Week 34.

Supporting Readers will also find an extra immersive element inside the PDF edition this week: a QR code you can scan that brings another small piece of Penny’s world beyond the page.

📚 Penny’s Diary Catch-Up

Just a quick note to say that the Penny’s Diary Catch-Up Page has now been updated to include Weeks 26 through 29.

So if you’ve missed any entries, or just want an easy way to dip back into the story and get your bearings before the newest diary pages, you can catch up here:

Catch Up: Penny's Diary - The Story So Far - Free Weekly Fiction

📖 Supporting Readers

Experience Penny’s Story More Deeply

If you’re enjoying Penny’s Diary, supporting readers can unlock the most immersive versions of the story.

The audio editions bring Penny’s voice to life, capturing the emotion, rhythm, and hesitation behind each entry.

The diary editions recreate the feeling of reading Penny’s actual journal — complete with Polaroids, sketches, notes, and the little details she tucks between the pages.

Together they offer the most complete way to experience Penny’s world.

👉 Become a Supporting Reader

Your support helps keep the AffinityVerse growing — one story, one mystery, and one diary page at a time.

Subscribe now

📖 Off the Page

This month was a particularly memorable one for exploring. We spent a week in North Wales, discovering incredible historic locations, beautiful gardens, and even a mountain zoo, while also finding time to revisit some of our favorite places closer to home. There is always something special about exploring somewhere new — or returning somewhere familiar and discovering a different side to it.

🏡 Plas Newydd House and Garden

Our first stop was Plas Newydd, a beautiful National Trust property on the Isle of Anglesey.

The house combines fascinating history, stunning views across the Menai Strait, and the remarkable story of the Marquesses of Anglesey. One of the highlights is the Rex Whistler mural — a huge and unusual work of art that has become one of the most famous features of the house.

The gardens were equally impressive, with woodland walks, sweeping views, and plenty of places to simply slow down and explore.

It was a fantastic introduction to Wales and definitely somewhere I’d love to return to.

🏰 Penrhyn Castle and Garden

Next was Penrhyn Castle, which was one of those places where the scale immediately makes an impression.

Built in the 19th century in a dramatic Norman-style revival, the castle feels almost like something from a fantasy setting. The huge rooms, grand staircases, and incredible architecture make it a fascinating place to wander through.

The surrounding grounds and views toward Snowdonia only add to the atmosphere. It is a place that feels designed to impress — and it certainly succeeds.

🏰 Castell Conwy

We also visited Castell Conwy, one of Wales’ most iconic medieval castles.

Standing above the town, the scale of the castle walls and towers gives a real sense of the power and ambition behind its construction. Walking around the battlements and looking out across Conwy was one of those moments where history feels very close.

There is something special about exploring places like this and imagining all the stories that have passed through them over hundreds of years.

🏡 Bodnant Garden

Bodnant Garden was a completely different experience.

Rather than towering walls and castles, this was about landscapes, color, and carefully designed spaces. The gardens are filled with incredible plants, winding paths, and hidden corners that encourage you to explore.

It was exactly the kind of place where you can spend hours wandering and still feel like there is more waiting around the next corner.

🏰 Castell Caernarfon

Another highlight was Castell Caernarfon. The scale of this place is incredible, with its massive walls, towers, and position beside the water. It is one of those locations where you can immediately understand why it was built where it was.

Exploring the different areas and looking across the surrounding landscape was a fantastic experience.

🐅 Welsh Mountain Zoo

We also visited the Welsh Mountain Zoo, which was a lovely change of pace.

Set high above Colwyn Bay, the zoo has incredible views alongside a wide range of animals. One particularly lovely surprise was seeing red squirrels for the first time, which was a real highlight of the visit.

It was a great mix of wildlife, scenery, and walking — and definitely one of those places where the setting is just as memorable as the animals themselves.

Looking back on the Wales trip as a whole, it was exactly the kind of adventure that always inspires me creatively — a mix of history, landscapes, wildlife, and places filled with stories waiting to be discovered. From castles that have stood for centuries to gardens that feel like they belong in another world, it was a fantastic reminder of why exploring new places is such a big part of my creative process.

🐅 Yorkshire Wildlife Park — A Night at the Zoo

And last night (as of this email going out), we made another special visit to Yorkshire Wildlife Park for their after-hours event, A Night at the Zoo.

There is something really special about experiencing the park later in the day. Walking around as the sun begins to set creates a completely different atmosphere compared to a normal daytime visit. The animals often feel more active, the crowds are smaller, and there is a peacefulness to simply wandering through the park in the evening light.

It was a wonderful way to end the day — seeing some familiar favorites from a completely different perspective and enjoying one of those experiences that reminds you why returning to places you love is always worthwhile.

We also made return visits to some of our favorite National Trust and English Heritage locations, because sometimes revisiting familiar places reveals something completely new.

I also found myself in London for a few days this month, but that deserves its own Behind the Magic email next week. It contains spoilers connected to recent Penny’s Diary events, so I want to give those stories a little more room to breathe.

📚 Currently Reading

I’m finally joining the many people who have already discovered A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson.

I’ll admit, I came to this one slightly backwards. I watched the first two seasons of the TV adaptation before reading the books, but after thoroughly enjoying those, I wanted to experience the original story.

I’m still fairly early into the book, but I’m already loving it.

One of the things that immediately grabbed me is the way the story uses case notes, documents, transcripts, and other investigative material throughout the book. That immersive style of storytelling is something I absolutely love — and, unsurprisingly, it’s a style that is very close to my own heart.

There is something incredibly satisfying about stories that let you piece together the mystery alongside the characters.

🎬 Just Watched

We went to the cinema as a family to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and I really enjoyed it.

For me, Spider-Man works best when he is closer to street level. Or, as a quote from the movie described it, “small potatoes” Spider-Man.

While the larger multiverse stories have been exciting, there is something special about seeing Peter Parker dealing with problems that feel more personal and grounded.

One thing I’ve always found interesting about Spider-Man stories is the idea of identity and what happens when the life someone knows is suddenly changed. Watching Peter rebuild from a world where everyone has forgotten him reminded me of why those themes have always appealed to me — the idea of holding onto who you are when the things around you no longer match the memories you have.

It’s probably one reason stories involving memory, identity, and finding your way back home continue to interest me so much.

This might actually be my favorite of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, which says a lot considering No Way Home was previously my favorite because of its huge multiverse event.

🛸Dalek Update

The Hachette half-size Dalek build has officially started going vertical.

After completing the base cover, I reached the point I had been both excited and slightly nervous about — the build is no longer spreading outward. It is now starting to rise.

Of course, no major build project would be complete without discovering that I had managed to fit two parts the wrong way around.

Which meant taking the base apart again and removing 56 screws just to correct my mistake. A slightly painful reminder that with something this complicated, it’s always worth checking everything before moving on to the next stage.

Thankfully, the correction is done, and the build is back on track.

This thing is going to be massive.

I also couldn’t resist taking a photo of the current progress — a precariously balanced stack showing just how many components have now been completed. It is starting to become much easier to imagine the finished Dalek standing in the office.

At least when it is finished, I’ll have a permanent guard for the office.

Although I’m not entirely sure whether I should feel protected or slightly concerned about being “exterminated” while writing.

🕰️ From the Archives

August marks the anniversary of my third Meridia Falls novel release — Enchanters: Meridia Falls Book 3, first published in 2017.

Looking back now, Enchanters is a fascinating point in the history of the AffinityVerse. It was the third book in the original series and introduced a lot of lore and concepts that would continue evolving into the newer versions of the universe.

One of my favorite examples is the Reperio — the magical paper compass that became such an important object in The Rogue Ghost Podcast. Seeing ideas travel from one story into another years later is one of my favorite parts of building a connected universe.

This book was part of an earlier vision of the AffinityVerse — the foundation stones that helped shape everything that came afterward.

Rather than quietly removing these earlier books from sale, I’m planning to rebrand them under the banner Visions of the AffinityVerse. That feels like the right way to preserve them: stories from an earlier creative phase, still meaningful and connected to the larger tapestry, but clearly presented as earlier interpretations rather than the current central continuity.

That brings us to the end of another very full Workbench.

August has felt like a month of connections — between old stories and new ones, between places I’ve visited and ideas they’ve sparked, and between characters whose worlds are becoming increasingly intertwined. Penny’s Diary continues to open doors I’ve been waiting a long time to reach, while away from the page there have been castles, wildlife, books, movies, and one increasingly imposing Dalek taking shape in the office.

Thank you, as always, for continuing to follow along with all of it. Every read, comment, message, and bit of support means a great deal, especially as the AffinityVerse continues to grow in directions I’ve been excited about for years.

I’d love to hear what has stood out to you this month — whether that’s a recent Penny’s Diary moment, somewhere you’ve explored, something you’ve watched or read, or even a project of your own that is finally starting to take shape.

Stay tuned, stay enchanted, and stay connected!

Warmest Regards,

DB

Share

Leave a comment

Explore the AffinityVerse

Previous week

Welcome to Penny’s Diary, a contemporary urban-fantasy serial. Read new diary entries every Thursday. Supporting readers can also access a weekly Writer’s Commentary, along with immersive audio and eBook editions, after each entry.

New to Penny’s story? Begin at the very first entry by clicking the button below and step into the moments where everything started to change.

Start at the beginning

Need to catch up?

Read a short guide through Penny’s diary so far — trace what she’s uncovered, what was taken from her, and how the truth keeps slipping out of reach.

Catch Up: The Story So Far

Penny’s Diary stands on its own—but this world holds more stories, waiting when you’re ready.

Explore the AffinityVerse

Saturday, August 15, 2026

Twelve Hours Earlier

If today was a movie, it would start with the tourist montage I did not actually get.

Me standing in front of Big Ben like I had personally discovered clocks.

Me pointing at a red bus with the kind of excitement usually reserved for miracles, lottery wins, or iced drinks arriving before the ice melts.

Me outside Buckingham Palace pretending I had complicated political opinions and did not mainly want a photo.

There would be music. Probably something aggressively British. Maybe a title card.

PENNY SUMMERS: LONDON.

Very glamorous.

Very international.

Then the screen would cut to black.

TWELVE HOURS EARLIER.

Except this is not a movie.

Because twelve hours earlier, I was in a tomb.

Not visiting one.

Not standing behind a velvet rope while someone explained the dead people and gift-shop opening times.

Inside one.

With Marilyn Moreau.

And no obvious way out.

Cupcakes Before a Bad Plan

Before we get to the tomb, we should probably go back to the start of Saturday.

Which began with cupcakes.

We went to Cascades because weekly rituals apparently do not cancel themselves just because Candy Steele has sent your girlfriend a private summons with the emotional warmth of a court order.

For a while, it was almost normal. Teddy met us there looking like he had slept for eleven minutes, worn down by Chen Print and already worrying about Sunday’s trip to Halifax to see his dad.

The new part-time help at the shop had taken a little pressure off, which Teddy described as progress in the voice of someone waiting for progress to develop terms and conditions.

Ellie ordered iced coffees, and Willowfen still followed us in little pieces.

Charlotte was working behind the counter. Felicia sat near the end, both of them laughing over something on Charlotte’s phone.

Redheads sticking together again.

Still cute, according to Ellie.

Still mildly threatening, according to me.

After our drinks, we took the cupcakes back to the Memory Vault.

Before opening Younger Penny’s fifth diary, we gave Teddy the safe Willowfen highlights.

The Bellweather Hotel.

The places we had loved without turning them into evidence.

I showed him a few of the ordinary photographs. Not the private ones. Those still belonged to me and Ellie.

Then we went over Candy’s message again.

Candy: Can you come by tomorrow afternoon before I leave? Need to clear something up. Just you.

Teddy hated the last two words as much as I did.

Every rule we had made around Candy said Ellie should not meet her alone.

Ellie knew that.

She also knew refusing completely might make Candy move the pressure somewhere else.

So we built the least bad version of a bad plan.

Ellie would go, keep the meeting short, and leave if Candy tried to change the location or isolate her further.

Only after that did we open Younger Penny’s fifth diary to where we had stopped before Willowfen.

The first entry that mattered was about Logan.

Younger me had searched for him outside of Clearwater. She even asked her teachers at school.

Nobody knew him.

She described him instead. Dark hair. Annoying smile. Said stupid things when I was scared because making me angry was better than letting me cry.

Nothing.

Then Eleanor appeared in the entries.

Younger Ellie.

Eleanor.

Adults answered with polite confusion or the careful voice they use when they think a child has invented someone.

The memory blasts came in pieces.

A cold school hallway.

My hand crushing a folded note.

A teacher asking, “Are you sure you haven’t mixed up the names?”

My own voice getting sharper.

Then frightened.

The worst part was not that younger me could not find them.

It was that she kept trying to prove they had existed at all.

The writing became messier. Names rewritten. Questions pushed into the margins.

Then three pages had been ripped out.

Of course they had.

Teddy wrote everything down.

He stared at the Matrix notebook before asking, “Who was allowed to know they existed?”

Not where had they gone.

Who was allowed to remember.

Younger Penny had known nothing about protected laptops, evidence boards, or recovery anchors.

She had only known that she loved people nobody else could see.

She had been trying to build Bobby before Bobby existed.

And now I had to wonder whether that instinct had really been hers alone.

The Person You Trust

We did not casually decide Ellie should meet Candy.

Refusing her completely might have made her escalate somewhere else, and Ellie wanted to face her instead of waiting for whatever “clear something up” meant.

So Teddy dropped her off at Seven Trees Farm.

I stayed in the Memory Vault to put away the fifth diary and enjoy being the person everyone considered safest when left behind.

Ellie texted when she arrived.

Then nothing for thirty-four minutes.

I know because I counted.

My phone buzzed while I was sliding the diary back into hiding.

Ellie: Found something out about Candy. Meridia Library. Back steps. Don’t call. Candy is here.

It felt wrong.

It was not on the RGN app. Ellie would normally tell me not to move before explaining why. She would also use punctuation properly during an emergency because apparently commas are part of moral character.

But it sounded rushed. Like Ellie had typed it while Candy was looking the other way.

And if Ellie had managed to get one warning out, waiting for a perfect message felt more dangerous than going.

The problem with trusting someone completely is that a message does not have to sound perfect.

It only has to sound urgent.

So I grabbed my backpack and left.

The library was open.

The back lane was empty.

No Ellie.

I sent one message.

Penny: Here.

Something moved behind me.

After that came fragments.

A hand over my mouth.

Fabric over my head.

My hands tied.

The rubber floor of a vehicle.

My knees striking metal whenever we turned.

I counted corners until six.

Then lost count.

When the hood came off, I was on cold stone with blood in my mouth from biting my lip.

One weak light.

Stone walls.

Stone ledges I decided not to examine.

And Marilyn Moreau sitting against the far wall, dirt on her face and her arms around her knees.

“Of course she brought you.”

The Steele family tomb lay beneath the old crypt at Seven Trees Farm.

Marilyn knew where the signal died, where shouting was useless, and which part of the frame shifted without opening.

I asked how.

“Because this isn’t the first time I’ve been locked in here.”

The outer door opened before I could ask anything else.

Candy walked in carrying my backpack.

She was calm.

Worse than screaming.

She explained that the group photograph from Three Falls—the one everyone kept sharing—had put Marilyn in the center and made it look like Candy had lost control.

She used words like loyalty, embarrassment, consequences, and people knowing their place.

Same thing.

Better outfit.

Candy searched my backpack.

The hidden diary compartment stayed hidden.

Then she found the Polaroid camera.

“You know what I like about old cameras?”

I suspected the answer was about to ruin photography.

Flash.

The picture slid out.

Marilyn.

Me.

The tomb wall behind us.

Candy tucked the photo into her pocket and dropped the camera back into my backpack.

“Someone will probably let you out tomorrow. Maybe the day after.”

She tilted her head.

“Assuming you’re both well behaved.”

Then she left, dropping my backpack beside the door.

The lock turned.

After Marilyn untied my hands, we shouted, pushed the door, tested the hinges, the air vents, and every loose stone we could find.

She showed me where she had once shifted part of the doorframe.

And where Candy had caught her afterward.

I tried my phone.

No signal.

Calls. Messages. Anything.

“It won’t work,” Marilyn said.

I tried once more anyway.

Nothing.

The air did not run out exactly.

It grew heavier.

My hands started shaking before I admitted I was scared.

Then I remembered the hidden compartment.

My diary was still inside the backpack.

Sean’s Seven of Hearts was tucked where I had left it.

And beneath both was RG’s help paper.

Marilyn watched me unfold it.

“What is that?”

“Hopefully not stationery.”

There was only the rule RG had given me.

Write the word when I meant it.

I pressed the paper against my knee and wrote.

HELP.

The ink disappeared into the page.

It grew hot enough to make me drop it.

Nothing happened.

Almost a minute passed.

Then a glowing orange line rose from the stone floor and traced a rectangle in the air.

The space inside folded open.

The tomb suddenly had somewhere else inside it.

RG stood on the other side, one hand braced against the shimmering frame, head lowered as though holding it together by force.

He reached for us.

The frame flickered.

Then RG caught my wrist.

I grabbed Marilyn.

And the tomb vanished.

I landed on polished floorboards hard enough to bruise my hip.

Books climbed through impossible balconies.

A staircase curved toward warm light.

Somewhere nearby, a bell rang although no door had opened.

RG collapsed beside us.

Marilyn stared at the endless shelves.

I sat up on the floor of a bookshop in London.

The London Antiquarian.

Alive.

Bruised.

And very far from home.

Sunday, August 16, 2026

Soup, Blankets, London

After the rescue, everything happened in a blur.

There was a medical check first.

RG checked our pupils, breathing, wrists, and bruises, then asked whether either of us felt sick, dizzy, confused, numb, or able to smell burning when nothing was burning.

That last one felt oddly specific.

Then the RGN app on my phone connected to something and let me group-call Ellie and Teddy.

Apparently international magical displacement did not require a roaming add-on.

I managed the important parts.

Candy.

Tomb.

Alive.

Marilyn with me.

RG got us out.

London.

Ellie made a sound that nearly broke me. Teddy started asking questions faster than I could answer them. I promised I would call properly in the morning.

Marilyn declined the offer to call home.

Then we slept.

I woke up under three blankets in a room that smelled like old paper, furniture polish, and soup.

Not a terrible combination.

Honestly, after the tomb, someone could have wrapped me in a shower curtain and handed me cold beans and I probably would have called it hospitality.

My left hip hurt where I had hit the floor. My shoulder felt like somebody had tried to remove it without permission. A bruise was forming around my wrist in the exact shape of someone else’s fingers, which was a fun little souvenir I had not requested.

Marilyn was already awake.

Of course she was.

She sat upright in the chair beside the narrow bed, still wearing the same dirt-marked clothes, with the blanket folded across her knees instead of around her. Her hair had been finger-combed. Her face was clean except for one dark mark near her jaw.

She looked like she was waiting for an interview.

Or sentencing.

There was soup on the small table between us.

Two bowls.

Two spoons.

One piece of bread each.

Marilyn had not touched hers.

RG returned carrying the same battered medical bag and repeated enough of last night’s checks to prove he still did not trust either of us to remain medically ordinary.

The help paper lay on a tray beside the Polaroid camera. One corner had burned away, and a dark line ran through the middle like the page had cracked.

I had not noticed the damage when we landed.

Probably because I had been busy hitting the floor of an impossible bookshop.

RG picked it up carefully.

“That rescue used my last Magic Shot. The paper won’t work again.”

Magic Shot.

Whatever that was.

The important words were last and won’t.

Apparently our emergency exit had been single-use, expensive, and now partially toasted.

A replacement did not seem to be arriving anytime soon either.

Excellent system.

After RG left us with instructions to eat, drink, and stay inside, I carried my soup out into the bookshop.

That was when The London Antiquarian became impossible again.

I had expected a narrow old bookshop. Maybe three rooms if everyone stood politely.

Instead, balconies climbed through several floors of shelves. A wooden staircase curved upward beneath glowing chandeliers. The counter looked older than Gramps’s favorite cinema projector, with a brass register and a neat stack of green notebooks beside it.

I finally understood why Ellie got so excited whenever somebody said, “It’s bigger on the inside.”

Green notebooks.

Exactly the same as my diaries.

I looked away.

The corridor behind the counter had changed since last night. I was sure of it. One doorway now stood where a wall had been, and somewhere deeper inside, floorboards creaked as if the building had shifted its weight.

Nothing about the place should have felt normal.

But standing there with soup warming my hands, I knew where the staircase turned before I looked.

I knew the counter would have notebooks.

I knew there was more space behind the left-hand door than the outside wall could possibly hold.

The London Antiquarian was not only strange.

I recognized it.

The Call Home

The call the night before had been proof of life.

This one was the conversation.

By the time I called properly, it was late afternoon in London and around lunchtime back home.

Ellie answered before the first full ring.

“Penny, I’m so sorry.”

Her voice broke on my name.

That was worse than the tomb for one very specific second.

I pictured her in the apartment, pacing around and worried sick.

“Candy did this,” I said. “She took your phone and sent the message. She did not use you.”

Ellie went quiet.

Trying-to-breathe quiet.

I gave her the proper version.

Bruised, not broken.

Marilyn was with me.

RG had gotten us out.

The backpack had survived, and the help paper looked partially toasted.

I also told her the bookshop felt weirdly familiar.

We stayed like that for another minute.

Just me and Ellie.

Then Teddy finally joined the group call.

Apparently he had spent exactly as long as his self-control allowed pretending to give us some privacy.

He took over before either of us could start apologizing in circles.

Exact location. Injuries. Blackout. Phone status. Whether Candy had seen the diary. Whether the Polaroid camera had survived. Whether RG had a return route.

By question six, I was out of breath.

By question nine, Teddy had stopped sounding calm enough to be believable.

I gave him what I knew.

London.

Bookshop.

Magical doorway.

Last Magic Shot, whatever that meant.

Damaged paper.

No route home yet.

That produced a silence with several curse words hiding inside it.

Ellie and Teddy had already built a cover.

As far as Meridia Falls needed to know, I was helping Gramps with restaurant-opening work. Marilyn’s mom had taken Candy, Kaelyn, and Sally on the ski vacation, so Marilyn told her stepdad, Isaac Steele, that she needed space and was staying with us for a few days.

Ellie said one of Candy’s lower-orbit girls had messaged her that morning. She had gone to unlock the crypt after Candy left and found it empty.

Apparently the message had started as Is Penny with you? and fallen apart from there.

Candy still did not know how we had escaped.

Mostly because nobody did.

I told Ellie about Marilyn.

How she knew exactly what to do because Candy had put her in that tomb before.

Mostly, I wanted Ellie beside me.

Instead, I told her to keep my side of the couch clear.

Tonight should have been Doctor Who night.

We should have been arguing over snacks while Teddy complained that our episode-selection system was not statistically valid. Ellie should have been leaning against me before the opening credits finished, pretending that was not always the plan.

Instead, I sat under a borrowed blanket in a London bookshop and listened to her breathe through a connection I did not understand.

Ellie finally said bye.

From another continent.

On what should have been our Doctor Who night.

The Bookstore Remembers

RG brought one of the green notebooks to the table after dinner.

Not one of mine.

Except it looked exactly like one of mine.

Same green cover. Same cream paper. Same slightly too-serious weight. Same embossed name.

My diary was in my backpack beside the ruined help paper.

The older ones were back at the Meridian.

But all of them had come from here.

Apparently.

RG said The London Antiquarian preserved things threatened by magical alteration.

Written truths.

Original records.

Names people had been made to forget.

Evidence preserved before it was altered.

He said it simply, like that did not explain half my life.

The diaries behind the AC vent. Missing pages. Recovery letters. Bobby.

Every system we had built because writing something down felt safer than leaving it inside our heads.

The shop was that idea made into a building.

RG turned the notebook so the embossed name faced us.

THE LONDON ANTIQUARIAN

I read it without difficulty.

Marilyn could too.

More importantly, she still remembered it after looking away.

So I told her about Teddy.

How he could read the name, look away, and lose it before he could repeat it properly.

When he could read it at all, that is.

How me and Ellie could both retain it.

Marilyn looked back at the notebook.

“So why can we remember it?”

RG explained it without making it less strange.

“The perception magic usually gives way after someone has been shown the place properly.”

Not heard about it.

Not read the name.

Shown the place.

That explained Marilyn now.

It did not explain Ellie and me.

“So you’re saying me and Ellie have been here before?”

RG did not answer that directly.

Which was almost worse.

He gave us only the edge of the wider story.

My Aunt Holly had known the shop too. She had preserved evidence because memory and records could be altered.

Then Holly had been erased.

Not killed.

Erased in the same impossible way Jemma Landry had been erased.

Made difficult for the world to hold.

Most people forgot her.

Some evidence survived.

There was more of it elsewhere, but RG was not opening the full subject while we were bruised, stranded, and missing from another country.

Rare good adult decision.

If the perception rule was right, me and Ellie had not simply heard the name before.

Someone had brought us here.

Or shown it to us closely enough that the magic still recognized us.

And if doors like this could open anywhere, maybe that was how Younger Penny and Eleanor had reached Longstone Hall too.

Neither of us remembered any of it.

Someone—or something—had made us forget.

I thought about Clearwater.

About waking up with the wrong version of my life and needing letters, drawings, and old evidence to put it back together.

“You know what happens to us after Clearwater,” I said.

He nodded.

“Does it affect you?”

“We’re exempt.”

We.

I noticed.

He did not explain.

“After Clearwater,” he said, “when you’re all back, send me a short message on the RGN app.”

Back.

He did not say memories restored.

He did not need to.

Monday, August 17, 2026

Not Marilyn Anymore

Waking up in London a second time made it official.

This was not one strange night that would end with me opening my eyes in my apartment at the Meridian and deciding never to eat anything suspicious before bed again.

I was still here.

Still bruised.

Still without a passport, luggage, or any legal explanation for how I had crossed the Atlantic.

At least I had my phone.

Which was useful for calling and messaging Ellie and completely useless for explaining how I had entered the United Kingdom without a passport.

The London Antiquarian provided practical things without anyone explaining where they came from.

Clean towels.

Toothbrushes still in their packaging.

A pile of borrowed clothes arranged by size and suspiciously close to what each of us would have chosen, which was either excellent magic or extremely organized stalking.

London was in the middle of a heat wave, so I took shorts, a purple T-shirt with a subtle Union Jack across the front, and the lightest pair of shoes available.

When in Rome.

Or London, apparently.

British weather had decided to become personally confusing.

Marilyn asked before touching anything.

Not politely in the normal way.

Carefully.

Could she take the blue shirt? Was the soap for both of us? Should she leave the towel somewhere specific? Did whoever owned the clothes need them back immediately?

She asked permission to eat the toast.

That one stayed with me.

I had seen Marilyn walk onto a stage like the building had been constructed around her. I had watched her make an entire room rearrange itself around the version of her people expected.

Here, with wet hair and borrowed clothes, she waited for someone to tell her whether breakfast was allowed.

I did not ask why.

Some questions are answers wearing disguises.

The Polaroid camera was safe in my backpack, although every time I saw it, I thought about the photograph developing in Candy’s hand.

Marilyn noticed me checking.

She looked away first.

We ate in the living room of one of the impossible apartments above the shop, where one wall definitely had not been there the night before.

The building had apparently decided we needed more privacy.

Normal bookstore behavior.

Marilyn kept correcting herself whenever she almost said something honest. Her dad became “painful stuff.” Candy became “the situation.” The tomb became “what happened.”

Then she set down her coffee.

Not nervously.

Deliberately.

“I don’t want to be Marilyn anymore.”

I waited.

She looked at me properly.

“Marilyn is the version Candy knows how to control. The pageant version. The one who smiles and does what she’s told.”

Her fingers tightened around the cup.

That was all she gave me.

It was enough.

Someone Else’s Emergency

RG had been dealing with another emergency before mine arrived and demanded international attention.

He showed me and Marilyn the practical version in a back room that looked like Bobby’s older, angrier cousin.

Maps.

Notes.

Photographs.

Names connected by lines.

Except RG’s board covered London, places I had never heard of, and routes that apparently did not involve roads.

At the center was one name.

Jenny.

I did not know who she was.

Not yet.

But RG said her name differently from everything else on the board.

Carefully.

Like it hurt.

“She’s someone I love,” he said.

That answered enough.

Jenny needed something called Medies Flor.

I had no idea what that meant either.

RG explained only the useful part. It was a treatment that could stabilize whatever was happening to her and slow it down.

Not cure it.

Buy time.

Her supply was almost gone.

A man named Tafarai—another person I had apparently entered the middle of knowing—had already helped RG plan a heist for Wednesday to get another vial.

Because apparently “medical emergency” and “planned heist” were allowed to belong in the same sentence now.

The problem was the route.

RG had mentioned Magic Shots after the rescue.

I still did not know what one was.

Only that he had used his last one to reach the tomb.

Then I wrote HELP.

He answered.

The heist had depended on RG’s last Magic Shot.

Now they needed another way in.

I looked at the ruined help paper tucked inside my diary and felt sick.

“You should have saved it,” I said. “For Jenny.”

RG stopped looking tired.

For one second, he looked dangerous.

“Candy Steele put you in that tomb. You asked for help because you needed it. I chose to answer. None of that belongs to you.”

Unfortunately, feelings are not required to listen when someone makes a good point.

A few minutes later, RG took a call from a woman named Cassandra.

Another new name.

Another person connected to a story I had somehow entered halfway through.

I only heard RG’s side of the conversation, but I caught the important parts.

Jenny was weaker.

Cassandra had done what she could.

Wednesday’s plan was still possible.

Stable did not mean fine.

The notes spread across RG’s board added more things I did not understand: failed routes, missing Magic Shots, and warnings about something called Shadow Gates.

Marilyn probably understood even less.

We had been dragged into RG’s world without a map, a glossary, or permission to pretend it made sense.

But I understood the consequence.

Getting us home was no longer as simple as opening another magical doorway.

Back in Meridia Falls, Ellie and Teddy were keeping the cover alive. I was supposedly helping Gramps with the restaurant opening. Marilyn had told her stepdad, Isaac Steele, she needed space and was staying with us.

RG also sent Gramps a coded message confirming that I was alive and with him.

A reply came back almost immediately.

Just enough to confirm Gramps had received it.

No panic.

No demand for proof.

No question about why I was with RG.

Excellent.

Another mystery for the pile.

By Monday night, the facts were these:

Jenny was running out of time.

RG had spent his last whatever-a-Magic-Shot-was saving me and Marilyn.

Getting home had become harder.

And Wednesday’s heist was still happening.

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Almost Being Tourists

RG allowed us out of the Antiquarian under rules that made the trip feel less like sightseeing and more like supervised release.

Stay together.

Do not go anywhere alone.

Apparently taking Polaroids in London was fine.

The first strange part came when we finally left through the front door.

The London Antiquarian stood in Cecil Court.

Actual Cecil Court.

The street I had already walked from one end to the other on Google Maps while trying to prove the shop existed.

I had checked every storefront.

Twice.

The Antiquarian had not been there.

Now it sat between the other shops in dark wood and green lettering as though it had been waiting for me to stop looking.

I took out the Polaroid camera before reality could change its mind.

The photograph caught the whole shop.

Proof that the London Antiquarian was really there.

Apparently Google Maps had not failed.

Reality had been uncooperative.

So me and Marilyn got heat, crowds, and the Underground.

Our phones worked for contactless payments. RG had also given us some British cash in case they didn’t, which was probably sensible considering we’d arrived through a magical doorway instead of Heathrow.

Ellie had also sent me one instruction.

Take the Underground to Earl’s Court. Come out of the station. Don’t look it up first. Trust me.

Suspicious.

Extremely Ellie.

The heat sat between the buildings and rose from the sidewalk like London had been left too close to an oven.

The Underground was worse. The map looked like several bowls of colored spaghetti had been forced into a transportation career, and the platforms felt approximately three degrees away from becoming soup.

Then we came out of Earl’s Court Station.

A blue police box stood outside like the universe had finally decided to apologize.

I stopped so suddenly Marilyn nearly walked into me.

I called Ellie before Marilyn could ask why.

She answered almost immediately.

I turned the phone so she could see it.

Then she made a sound usually associated with lottery wins, surprise puppies, and people discovering David Tennant in their kitchen.

“You found it.”

“You sent me to the TARDIS.”

Technically, she had sent me to a police box.

Emotionally, Ellie was correct.

She demanded photographs from every possible angle. Phone photos. Polaroids. Close-ups of the sign. One proving I had not found the whole thing online and staged an elaborate international prank.

And one with me standing beside it.

Marilyn took that one.

I stood beside the police box in borrowed clothes, bruises hidden underneath, and the biggest smile I had managed since Saturday.

Willowfen had given us Polaroids of places we had chosen together.

This one came from a place Ellie had sent me to from another continent, during a week that had taken every other plan we had and thrown it into traffic.

Still ours.

By the time the image appeared, I already knew it belonged to Ellie.

Tourist Spots and Real Names

We spent a few hours doing the tourist things I had joked about on Saturday.

Big Ben.

Tower Bridge.

Buckingham Palace.

Red buses. Red telephone boxes. The London Eye.

All the spots.

Turns out my fake movie montage had accidentally become real.

Every ordinary shop window felt mildly offensive.

People were buying shoes.

Someone was arguing over iced coffee.

A child was crying because they had dropped an ice cream.

Meanwhile, me and Marilyn had entered the country through a magical doorway, had no passports, and were somehow stuck in the middle of a planned heist involving medicine that did not officially exist.

Normal life has terrible timing.

Then we found a café with tables outside beneath enormous cream parasols.

Nobody cared that we had been kidnapped and transported across the Atlantic by magic.

They cared that we ordered something.

Honestly, refreshing.

Marilyn ordered an iced coffee.

I chose a chocolate milkshake because I had already reached my daily limit for pretending to be mature.

We sat in the shade while the city carried on around us. Big Ben rose above the rooftops beyond the terrace, part of the view rather than the destination.

No tomb.

No impossible bookstore.

No adults using words like route instability as though that was a normal thing to say before lunch.

Marilyn held her cup with both hands.

She had been quiet since the police box, which was impressive considering Ellie’s excitement had probably been audible from Canada.

I did not push.

That seemed to surprise her.

For a while, she looked past me at the city.

Then she said, “Call me Maz.”

Not a nickname offered casually.

A decision.

A line drawn between the version Candy knew how to control and the person she was choosing for herself.

So I did.

“Maz.”

Her shoulders dropped.

Only a little.

But enough.

London did not know about the Maple Crown. Nobody here knew who Marilyn Moreau was supposed to be.

She looked down at her iced coffee.

I asked her then why she had warned me off Three Falls in the first place.

“Because Candy wanted you there.”

“That’s it?”

“When Candy wants something, it’s always for a reason,” Maz said. “Even if you don’t know what it is yet.”

I thought about the group photograph. Candy’s face when she saw it spreading online. The Polaroid she had taken in the tomb.

Apparently Three Falls had not been the trap.

It had been the start of Candy deciding what kind of trap came next.

Maz stirred her drink even though the ice had already done most of the work.

“It’s better to stay away from her if you can.”

Then she said, “Candy knows things about my dad.”

Not everything.

Not a full confession.

Just that.

She explained the careful version. Candy could make his situation worse. Candy had information she could make public if Maz stopped cooperating. The pageant, the rumors, Steve, me, Ellie—none of that had ever been the whole reason she obeyed.

Her dad was the part Candy kept underneath everything else.

Maz stared into her drink while she said it, face controlled, shoulders locked, voice perfectly steady.

The same voice she used at school assemblies.

The same one she used with teachers.

The same one she probably used when judges asked questions under stage lights and expected confidence instead of truth.

I wanted to tell her I understood.

I did not.

Not fully.

So I gave her the honest version.

“Being scared explains a lot,” I said. “It doesn’t mean I understand all of it yet.”

She nodded.

No argument.

No demand that I trust her immediately.

That helped more than an apology probably would have.

A red bus rolled past and a tourist nearly walked into a lamppost while looking the wrong way for traffic.

Maz almost smiled.

Almost.

Then I watched the Marilyn version of her try to come back.

Not out loud.

Not deliberately.

Just years of habit reaching for the safest mask she owned.

She stopped herself before it settled.

Candy had not invented Marilyn Moreau.

The crown.

The perfect posture.

The smile that could survive judges, rumors, and entire rooms waiting for her to fall apart.

Those things were real.

Candy had simply convinced her that Marilyn was the only version worth protecting.

She had chosen Maz instead.

The Veiled Sigil

After our accidental tourist montage, RG introduced us to another British tradition.

Fish and chips.

We ate them from paper at the Antiquarian while he explained that vinegar was apparently a food choice and not a cleaning accident.

By dusk, the temperature had dropped from unbearable to merely rude.

That was when RG took us to the Veiled Sigil.

It occupied a dark storefront in a narrow old courtyard, glowing faintly against the deepening evening. The windows were crowded with objects, the black-painted frontage looked older than everything around it, and the whole place had the feeling of something that had arrived before us and might leave again the second we stopped looking.

RG said it had the same kind of perception magic as the Antiquarian, only less determined.

Inside was worse.

Or better.

Shelves rose beneath blue-green light, packed with old books, bottled liquids, sealed boxes, stones, metal instruments, and objects that looked as though touching them without permission might permanently alter your personality.

The air smelled like dust, herbs, hot glass, and expensive mistakes.

Tafarai waited behind a crowded counter.

He wore dark clothes, long dreadlocks, and the expression of someone who had already decided RG’s explanation would be inadequate.

His eyes moved from RG to me and Maz.

“You brought teenagers.”

“They’re here because the plan changed,” RG said.

Tafarai looked at him for a long moment.

“That sentence contains more than one problem.”

I liked him immediately.

Probably unsafe.

The back room held the practical version.

Printed catalog pages.

Handwritten notes.

Old photographs.

Digital listings showing six possible vials of elixir distilled from a flower called Medies Flor.

One was genuine.

The others were decoys, substitutions, or fraud with excellent paperwork.

RG explained that Wednesday’s auction was part of an underground magical antiquities exchange—because apparently ordinary criminals did not have enough complicated terminology.

The original plan had involved only him and Tafarai.

They would use RG’s last Magic Shot to reach a secured vault inside the auction house before bidding began, while the real vial was still unattended and the decoys had not yet been set up.

He would recover the vial. Tafarai wanted a small black pouch hidden in the same display.

Neither of them explained what was inside it.

Apparently professional criminals also preferred selective disclosure.

Except RG had used that Magic Shot to reach me and Maz.

Which meant the quiet version of the plan no longer existed.

Now they would have to enter during the auction as bidders, after the decoys had been placed, with staff, guests, and security watching the display.

RG could make the swap without anyone noticing.

Tafarai could control access and timing.

But neither of them could identify the real vial without examining it long enough to raise suspicion.

And making the swap would require attention to be somewhere else.

The quiet two-person heist had become something else.

Then RG looked at me.

“We may need your help identifying the real vial.”

Not you are coming.

Not this is the plan.

A question.

Tafarai showed me the material.

The digital records were perfect.

Too perfect.

Same dates. Same descriptions. Same polished chain of ownership.

The printed evidence was messier.

One old photograph showed a hairline flaw in a stopper.

A handwritten note mentioned dark wax around the neck after transport damage.

A later image showed the same mark from another angle.

Physical mistakes.

The sort of details people forgot when they copied a story.

“I might be able to tell which one is real,” I said.

That did not mean I had agreed yet.

Then Maz studied the guest list.

Not the names. The way they had been arranged.

Titles first. Organizations beneath them. Seating priority marked beside some and nothing beside others.

She understood it immediately.

Who expected special treatment.

Who would treat staff like part of the furniture.

Who would become louder if someone younger questioned their importance in front of the right audience.

Pageant skills.

Except this time, she would choose how to use them.

Tafarai gave her several artifacts to target, along with one insulting fact about each of them.

Maz worked out what kind of bidder would take each insult personally.

RG asked whether she could create one controlled distraction if they needed it.

Maz looked at the names again.

“Yes.”

No Marilyn smile.

No polished performance yet.

Just Maz making the decision.

Then RG placed a small wooden box on the table.

“This is an Enchanted Music Box,” he said. “Jenny made it.”

His voice changed slightly when he said her name.

Dark wood. Silver fittings. Beautiful enough to make me suspicious.

Inside was a silver cylinder and a concealed needle. A drop of blood from each person would create a temporary link. While the melody played, certain magical alarms and detection spells would pay less attention to us. It also confused what RG called “mortal security”—cameras, motion sensors, and most other systems designed by people who thought magic was not real.

Not guards.

Not anyone with functioning eyes.

Tafarai made that very clear.

“This does not make you invisible. It makes the magic less interested.”

Comforting.

RG gave us the limits before either of us agreed.

I would stay near the records and identify the genuine vial.

Maz would create one distraction only if Tafarai signaled.

Tafarai would control access and timing.

RG would make the swap.

It felt like Mission: Impossible had taken a wrong turn into a Harry Potter movie.

Except the two teenagers were not action heroes.

We would not be backup.

We would not be field agents.

If anything changed, we would leave.

Maz looked at me.

I thought about Jenny’s name at the center of RG’s board.

About the way he had said someone I love.

About the last Magic Shot he had spent answering my call for help.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

Maz nodded.

“So will I.”

RG did not look relieved.

He looked worried.

Which was probably the correct adult response.

By the time we left, I had a fake name.

Maz had a performance role.

And Wednesday’s heist depended on two teenagers doing exactly one useful thing each.

No improvising.

RG looked directly at me when he said that part.

Rude.

Fair.

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Dress Code: Crime

I spent part of Wednesday morning on the RGN app with Ellie.

Mostly normal things.

The restaurant opening.

The apartment.

Whether Teddy had slept.

Whether the police-box Polaroids were safe or still rattling around in my backpack like evidence in a very emotional court case.

I nearly told her about the heist three times.

The RGN app was secure.

RG trusted it. He still did not want the plan discussed over any connection at all.

So I said nothing.

Which was difficult, because keeping secrets from Ellie felt wrong even when the secret involved a magical auction and several excellent reasons not to mention it.

By late afternoon, London was still hot enough to make formal clothing feel like a personal attack.

The clothes were designed to make us look as though we belonged at an invitation-only antiquities exchange.

Which was impressive, considering I barely belonged in London.

My cover identity came with a lightweight fitted jacket, fake credentials, and an expression RG described as “quietly competent.”

Apparently my normal expression was unusable.

Maz wore dark formal clothes made from fabric thin enough to survive the heat, with the kind of posture that made people assume she had been invited personally.

Marilyn Moreau had been trained for rooms like this.

Maz was choosing how to use it.

Tafarai checked the credentials, printed catalog, and escape route.

RG checked everything again because trust is apparently not a major part of professional crime.

Then he placed his Enchanted Music Box on the table.

The one Jenny had made.

Small enough to fit in one hand.

Dark polished wood.

Silver fittings around the lid.

Beautiful enough to make me suspicious.

Inside, tucked beside the cylinder, was the concealed needle.

One press.

One bright drop of blood.

Tafarai went first, then RG, Maz, and me.

The blood disappeared into the mechanism.

That was more disturbing than the needle.

Mostly because everyone acted like it was normal.

RG repeated the rules.

I identified the genuine vial and did nothing else.

Maz created one distraction when Tafarai signaled.

Tafarai controlled access and timing.

RG made the swap.

We were not backup.

We were not field agents.

We were two teenagers with one useful skill each and an exit route if the adults lost control.

“If anything changes, you leave immediately. You do not wait for us, and you do not improvise.”

He looked at me for the final part.

Historically justified.

Still rude.

RG closed the lid and wound the mechanism.

The Music Box began to play.

The melody was beautiful.

Soft enough to disappear beneath ordinary conversation.

Haunting enough that I was not sure I wanted to hear the end of it.

Nobody outside our group reacted.

Apparently only the four of us could hear it.

RG opened the door.

And I realized the heist had already started.

The Wrong Vial

The auction was held in a townhouse designed to make ordinary people feel underdressed.

Tall windows.

Quiet carpets.

Security guards pretending not to be security guards.

The formal rooms had trapped enough of the day’s heat to make my lightweight jacket feel less lightweight by the minute.

Somewhere inside Tafarai’s coat, RG’s Music Box played its beautiful, haunting melody.

Nobody outside our group reacted.

Very normal Wednesday.

My job was observation.

I stayed near the records table and compared the printed catalog with the digital listings.

The screens insisted the Medies Flor was inside a narrow blue-glass vial with a silver stopper.

Perfect dates.

Perfect provenance.

Perfect photographs.

Too perfect.

An older printed image showed a hairline crack in the stopper and black wax around the neck after transport damage.

The blue vial had neither.

The real one sat two cases over in plain glass, dismissed as an unverified botanical concentrate.

The liquid inside was orange and almost glowing, as though someone had bottled the last light before sunset.

Its stopper had the crack.

Its box carried the wax stain.

I moved the printed photograph half an inch to the left.

Signal given.

Tafarai saw it.

RG moved toward the correct case.

Then Maz created the distraction.

She chose a bidder who was loud without raising his voice and surrounded by people who laughed before he finished speaking.

She stepped into his path wearing Marilyn’s perfect posture and Maz’s absolute lack of patience.

He glanced at her badge and tried to move past.

Maz followed his gaze toward one of the artifacts Tafarai had identified.

“I’m sorry,” she said, loudly enough for everyone nearby. “I assumed someone bidding at this level would recognize a nineteenth-century reproduction.”

The room changed.

The bidder stopped.

Maz looked politely concerned, which was more insulting than laughing.

He began explaining why she was wrong.

Then he began explaining louder.

People gathered.

A guard shifted toward the argument.

Tafarai followed with calm apologies and private-event diplomacy.

The room bent exactly where Maz needed it to.

RG opened the display.

I saw only pieces.

His hand near the lock.

The orange vial disappearing.

The blue decoy taking its place.

Then RG found the hidden compartment beneath the velvet lining.

Inside sat the small black pouch Tafarai had come for.

RG slipped it into his coat without opening it.

Beneath the pouch lay a narrow silver tube.

I had seen something like it once before, when RG changed back into a crow.

He stopped.

Across the room, Tafarai saw his expression change.

The polite mask vanished from his face.

He mouthed, “Leave it.”

RG did not.

That was when I understood the tube mattered, even if I did not know why.

The Music Box gave one high note.

That was our cue.

I moved.

Maz joined me near the hall without looking rushed. Tafarai appeared behind us, still apologizing to someone over his shoulder. RG came last.

Nobody ran until the front door closed.

We crossed two streets and slipped into a small courtyard.

The Music Box stopped.

Tafarai handed it back to RG. RG passed him the black pouch, which disappeared into Tafarai’s coat without being opened.

Then Tafarai checked the vial of Medies Flor elixir.

Real.

Sealed.

Enough to help Jenny.

RG was already examining the stolen silver tube.

Up close, I saw three sharp lines stamped into its side, bound together by a single horizontal stroke.

Tafarai cursed.

RG took out his own metal tube and pressed the ends together. He held them there for several seconds—then pulled them apart.

He buried the stolen one in the deepest trash can.

Apparently it carried some kind of magical tracker.

Explanations had officially become a luxury.

Back at the Veiled Sigil, RG told us the tubes were officially called Liberiums, although almost everyone just called them Magic Wands. The stolen one had held ten Magic Shots, now transferred into his own.

Magic Wands.

Cute name for something that looked like a flashlight.

Tafarai said Magic Shots were becoming rarer by the day.

Someone was interfering with the supply.

Someone deciding who could use them.

They both recognized the symbol.

Neither understood what it meant.

RG could take us home now.

Finally.

Or we could go with him while he delivered the Medies Flor elixir to Jenny.

Sensible people would have chosen home.

Maz looked at the orange liquid inside the vial.

We had helped steal medicine for a woman we had never met.

Going home without knowing whether it saved her felt impossible.

The heist had worked.

Tafarai had his pouch.

RG had the vial.

His Magic Wand now held ten Magic Shots.

And the symbol they recognized but could not explain had turned a successful theft into proof of something much larger.

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Runeweaver

We did not go straight to Jenny.

The heist had apparently made enough noise that RG wanted to give whoever was searching for the thieves time to start looking somewhere else.

The stolen Liberium had carried some kind of tracker, and RG wanted several hours to make sure nobody had followed us from the auction or traced us back to Cecil Court.

He was not opening another doorway until he knew we were clear.

So we waited.

Until morning.

At first light, RG took Maz and me into the main bookshop, beneath the curved staircase.

“We’re going to Sussex,” he said.

“To Runeweaver.”

He held an old brass doorknob in front of him and pressed his Magic Wand against the side of his neck.

His lips started moving.

Fast.

Almost silent.

I only caught one word because he kept repeating it.

“Runeweaver.”

Again.

And again.

Then his eyes began to sparkle.

Bright flecks moving through them like light trapped beneath glass.

Magic sparkle.

Exactly like Candy’s eyes on the Seven Trees tape.

My stomach dropped.

Candy.

RG.

Whatever they were—the same kind of magic lived inside both of them.

Before I could ask, an orange outline formed around the doorknob in RG’s hand.

A door drawn into empty air.

The frame flickered once before settling.

Not encouraging.

RG pulled the doorknob.

The space inside opened somewhere else.

We stepped into the basement of an old stone watermill.

Cold air replaced London’s heat. Water rushed somewhere beyond the old stone walls, but the mill machinery looked as though it had not moved in years.

The room looked like a hacker’s idea of paradise.

Screens covered one wall.

Computers occupied two long desks.

Cables disappeared beneath floorboards and reappeared beside labeled drawers. Tools, notebooks, unfinished devices, and empty coffee cups filled every available surface.

It looked as though someone had been working there five minutes earlier and expected to return.

“This was Ruby’s watermill,” RG said quietly.

Ruby Weaver.

The hacker behind the USB flash drive.

“Runeweaver was her alias.”

He looked around the room.

“After she died, we named the place after her.”

Ruby was dead.

The room was still being used, but nobody had disturbed the way she had left it.

“I thought her alias was Truthweaver.”

“It was,” RG said. “Runeweaver came later, after she was forced to change it. She made the new one from her own name. Ruby Neve Weaver.”

Bought Time

Upstairs was different.

Warm wood.

Soft furniture.

Blankets folded over chairs.

A kitchen that looked used rather than staged.

Somebody had turned the old mill into a home without removing the machinery, as if comfort and danger had agreed to share the building.

A woman met us before I finished taking it in.

“Dr. Cassandra Hawthorne,” RG said.

Doctor.

That became obvious almost immediately.

Her dark hair was tied back, and she moved with the calm certainty of someone who had already decided what mattered.

She looked at the orange vial before she looked at any of us.

Then she moved.

No questions about the heist.

No introductions beyond her name.

Only Jenny.

She lay upstairs beneath a light blanket.

For one confused second, I thought RG had taken us to the wrong woman.

Jenny looked old.

Not Gramps old.

Frail-old. Skin drawn thin across her face, silver hair against the pillow, hands that looked too delicate to hold anything. Her breathing came carefully, as though every breath had to be negotiated first.

Then RG said her name.

Jenny.

The woman he loved.

Cassandra gave us the useful explanation while she checked the vial of Medies Flor elixir. Whatever had happened to Jenny caused her body to age far faster than it should. The elixir could push that damage back.

Temporarily.

It bought time.

It did not cure her.

Cassandra broke the seal and let a few drops fall onto Jenny’s lips.

The readings on one screen jumped.

Then settled.

A little color returned to her face.

The tightness around her mouth loosened.

Nothing dramatic happened.

She did not suddenly sit up young and healthy because apparently magic had boundaries whenever that was least convenient.

But the hand resting on the blanket stopped trembling.

Some of the grayness left her skin.

The elixir had started working.

Not cured.

Not even close.

RG stood beside the bed.

The version of him that handled plans, stolen medicine, and impossible doorways disappeared.

His shoulders dropped.

He covered his face with one hand, then reached for Jenny’s.

Cassandra watched the readings.

“Stable is not cured.”

RG nodded without looking away.

The Medies Flor had bought time.

Nobody congratulated us.

Nobody called us heroes.

Cassandra said we should never have needed to be involved.

RG said coming to the watermill had been the right choice once the medicine was secured.

Those were not the same thing.

I appreciated the difference.

RG remained beside the bed.

He still held Jenny’s hand.

Tightly enough that letting go looked like it might change the result.

Remember Holly

After Jenny was stable, Cassandra wanted the room quiet.

RG took me and Maz outside.

The heat had softened without actually leaving. Water rushed past the old stone mill, silent now and long since retired from the work it had been built to do.

A short path led into a small memorial garden.

At its center stood a stone obelisk.

Plaques surrounded its base.

Names.

People I had never met.

The one at the center read:

RUBY NEVE WEAVER

RG stopped there for a moment.

He did not explain the others.

I did not ask.

Some places told you when questions could wait.

After a while, we went back inside.

The watermill had another room nobody had been ready to show me yet.

Not because it was more dangerous.

Because it was personal.

RG opened one drawer and took out a Polaroid.

A woman stood alone in the frame.

Brown hair.

Purple highlights.

Eyes bright with the same impossible sparkle I had seen in RG’s when he opened the glowing doorway.

Not sunlight.

Magic.

I recognized her from the Polaroid Gramps had given me.

Holly Summers.

My aunt.

My aunt had magic.

For the first time, I wondered whether that was something my family had merely been caught up in.

Or something we carried.

Beneath the image, someone had written one word in hurried handwriting:

Breach!

The ink had faded.

The warning had not.

RG placed a notebook beside the photograph.

Same green cover as mine.

Same cream pages.

Same embossed name.

The pages held more than one handwriting.

Dates.

Names.

Questions.

Some passages had been written twice, as though whoever had written them had forgotten them once already and needed to rebuild them from the beginning.

Short warnings.

Arrows.

Corrections.

RG touched one of the notes in the margins.

“That was Holly.”

I looked at him.

My Aunt Holly.

Then he touched the handwriting that filled most of the pages.

“And that was Vanessa Colby. Ruby’s aunt.”

He let that settle.

Holly had been working with Vanessa Colby.

The woman who had saved my life.

Ruby’s aunt and mine had known each other.

One sentence had been underlined hard enough to leave an impression on the next page:

If memory changes, trust what we made before it changed.

That was when Younger Penny walked into the room without actually being there.

The diaries behind the AC vent.

The missing pages.

The recovery letters.

Instructions left for a future version of me who might wake without the truth.

Holly and Vanessa had done exactly the same thing.

Older.

Better prepared.

Still frightened enough to leave themselves breadcrumbs.

RG explained only what I needed.

Vanessa had lost access to parts of her memory. Analog evidence helped her recover pieces because magical changes did not always affect memory and physical records in the same way.

That part felt familiar.

Taking Polaroids because photographs had already proved harder to erase.

Keeping camcorder tapes. Writing recovery letters. Hiding drawings where a reset might miss them.

Same tools.

Same fear.

Leave enough behind that the next version of us could find the way back.

Holly had recognized the danger early enough to preserve a trail.

She had also asked Vanessa to watch over me.

That was why Vanessa had been there when the car came for me.

Not coincidence.

Not luck.

My aunt had sent her.

Vanessa had kept the promise for as long as she could.

After she died, it passed to Ruby. And after Ruby, it passed to RG.

I had never met Ruby Weaver.

But she had carried a promise with my name in it.

For one uncomfortable second, that felt too close to being my fault.

Then Holly had been erased.

From people.

From family.

From records.

From almost every trace that she had ever existed.

Except the safeguards remained.

The Polaroid.

The notebook.

Camcorder tapes.

And one name that appeared beside several warnings.

Henry Church.

I told RG everything.

Church helping Gramps.

The ghost box that had captured Jemma’s ghost.

Jemma being erased the way Holly had been.

Gramps accepting Church’s help while treating every conversation around him as though it might contain a hidden blade.

RG’s expression changed.

“Reformed and safe are not the same thing.”

He would not tell me the rest.

Of course he would not.

Only that Henry Church had worked with dangerous people, fought dangerous people, and occasionally managed both at the same time.

Helpful did not mean harmless.

I looked back at the photograph.

If Holly and Vanessa had known The London Antiquarian...

Maybe they had taken younger me there.

Maybe Ellie too.

That would explain why we could both see the shop’s name when Teddy could not.

Except there was no date.

No record of a visit.

No proof.

Only another possibility waiting for us somewhere further down the road.

Friday’s return was being prepared.

Not guaranteed.

Prepared.

I picked up the Polaroid one last time.

Holly’s face had survived.

Her sparkling eyes had survived.

And beneath them, one warning remained.

Breach!

I still did not know what it meant.

But apparently Aunt Holly had believed somebody needed to.

I was holding proof that she had existed.

And something powerful had made almost everyone forget her.

Friday, August 21, 2026

Not Cured

Jenny was better on Friday morning.

Not well.

Better.

Her breathing stayed steady. She could speak without every sentence costing her something. Some of the impossible age had begun to leave her face—although she still looked far older than she should have.

Cassandra said the Medies Flor had bought them time, which was becoming my least favorite kind of good news.

RG prepared us to leave with the same expression Teddy used before handing me anything fragile.

I remembered the cover story for back home.

I had been helping Gramps prepare for the Meridian opening.

Maz had needed space and stayed with me and Ellie.

No London Antiquarian.

No magical auction.

No Jenny.

No watermill.

Definitely no international theft involving stolen magical medicine and fake identities.

I looked down at the borrowed clothes and wondered whether The London Antiquarian expected them back.

RG noticed.

“Keep them.”

“Really?”

“If the Antiquarian gave them to you, they were never on loan.”

I decided not to ask how a bookshop developed opinions about wardrobes.

Before we left, RG handed me Aunt Holly’s Polaroid.

Only the Polaroid.

The notebook, camcorder tapes, and everything else stayed behind.

Apparently some evidence was safer when it did not travel with me.

“It belongs with you,” he said.

I slipped it between the pages of my diary until I could place it safely inside the Memory Vault.

More proof that she had existed.

Proof that magic ran somewhere through my family.

Assuming home remained somewhere I could safely keep evidence.

That thought followed me while RG checked the return route.

I wanted Meridia Falls so badly my chest hurt.

I wanted Ellie.

Teddy.

Gramps.

The Memory Vault.

My own clothes.

Doctor Who night.

But home also contained Candy.

Henry Church.

Clearwater.

And something powerful enough to erase Aunt Holly so completely that her own family had forgotten to miss her.

A week earlier, Meridia Falls had been the place I understood.

Now I wanted it more than anything.

And trusted it less than I ever had.

Welcome to Our World

RG opened the return route behind the Meridian, directly across from the doors to Gramps’s workshop.

Somewhere he had been before.

Somewhere the magic already knew.

He held the brass doorknob in empty air and pressed his Liberium against the side of his neck.

His eyes began sparkling again.

Bright flecks moving beneath the surface.

Candy’s eyes on the Seven Trees recording.

Holly’s eyes in the Polaroid.

“What is that?” I asked.

He paused, still holding out the doorknob, and looked at Maz and me.

“Radiance,” he said. “It appears when Enchanters use magic.”

Enchanters.

A name for whatever connected my aunt, Candy Steele, and the man preparing to open a doorway behind my grandfather’s cinema.

Also—possibly me.

I was not ready to examine that part yet.

“And the... talking?”

I wasn’t sure what else to call it.

“You repeat something every time you open one of those doors.”

The corner of his mouth almost smiled.

“A focus word.”

He tapped the Magic Wand lightly against his neck.

“Enchanters shape magic through spoken focus. Sometimes aloud. Sometimes barely above a whisper.”

That explained why I had kept hearing him say Runeweaver.

Enchanters.

Radiance.

Focus words.

One answer.

Approximately forty-seven new questions.

The glowing orange frame formed around the doorknob.

RG pulled it open.

The back of the Meridian appeared where there should have been only empty air.

Home.

He reminded us to keep the cover simple and contact him through the RGN app if anything changed.

Then me and Maz stepped through.

The doorway closed behind us without an explosion, dramatic music, or reality collapsing.

Just the familiar brick wall, Gramps’s workshop doors, and air that smelled faintly of paint, old wood, and restaurant preparations.

I wanted to run upstairs.

So I did.

Maz followed me through the rear entrance and up the stairs with the expression of someone who had crossed an ocean through magic but still did not want to inconvenience anyone.

The apartment was quiet when I opened the door.

For one second, I stood in the living room listening.

Then I called, “Honey, I’m home.”

Footsteps hit the floor somewhere inside.

Fast.

Ellie appeared from the bedroom.

She stopped long enough to see me.

Then she launched herself across the room.

She hit me hard enough to find every bruise I still had.

I wrapped both arms around her anyway.

She smelled like shampoo, the apartment, and home.

Then she kissed me.

Not carefully.

Not politely.

The kind of kiss that contained a tomb, another continent, one missed Doctor Who night, and every hour she had spent not knowing whether I was coming back.

When we finally separated, Ellie kept both hands against my face as though checking I was solid.

Still here.

Then she started apologizing.

Her phone.

Candy’s message.

The library.

How she should have known.

I caught her hands.

“That message came from your phone. It did not come from you.”

Her face folded anyway.

But she nodded.

Enough for now.

Then I noticed Maz standing just inside the living room.

Watching.

Borrowed clothes.

Perfect posture.

Trying to take up as little space as possible inside somebody else’s reunion.

If she had ever been unclear about what me and Ellie were to each other, she was not anymore.

She had seen The London Antiquarian.

The green notebooks.

RG’s world.

My aunt’s magic.

A woman aging decades before her time.

An international heist involving false identities, stolen medicine, and a Music Box that needed blood.

She had fallen into our world.

Now she had to decide whether she wanted to be part of it.

Next week

Diary index

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. There’s more to come.

If you’d like to talk about this diary entry, you’re welcome to share your thoughts in the chat.

Stay tuned, stay enchanted, and stay connected!

Warmest Regards,

DB

🗝️ Supporting Reader Content

The Affinity Web Chronicles is a reader-supported publication. You can subscribe for free to receive new fiction every Thursday, along with regular updates.

Supporting readers unlock an exclusive Writer’s Commentary, immersive audio, and eBook editions, and help make stories like Penny’s Diary possible.

Subscribe now

Read more

Previous week

Welcome to Penny’s Diary, a contemporary urban-fantasy serial. Read new diary entries every Thursday. Supporting readers can also access a weekly Writer’s Commentary, along with immersive audio and eBook editions, after each entry.

New to Penny’s story? Begin at the very first entry by clicking the button below and step into the moments where everything started to change.

Start at the beginning

Need to catch up?

Read a short guide through Penny’s diary so far — trace what she’s uncovered, what was taken from her, and how the truth keeps slipping out of reach.

Catch Up: The Story So Far

Penny’s Diary stands on its own—but this world holds more stories, waiting when you’re ready.

Explore the AffinityVerse

Saturday, August 8, 2026

Croissants Before Social Warfare

Ellie woke me at a time that should only exist for airport departures and medical emergencies.

She was standing beside the bed with two iced drinks, a paper bag from Cascades, and the kind of expression people get when they have already made several decisions on your behalf and are feeling very pleased about it.

“Up,” she said. “We’re getting the bus to Halifax.”

Apparently this was not a kidnapping because she had brought croissants.

The plan was clothes shopping at the mall before Three Falls, with a strict return bus because we still had to get changed, pack everything, and reach the trailhead for one-thirty.

I pointed out that I already owned clothes.

Ellie explained, with unnecessary patience, that I did not own clothes suitable for a pool party in a forest where everyone would be taking photographs.

Which was fair.

I had no idea what the etiquette was for a “pool party” where the pool was technically a waterfall-fed body of water, the changing room was probably a tree, and leaving required a fifteen-minute hike back to the cars.

So I made the strategic decision to let Ellie choose everything.

This was partly because she understood clothes.

It was also because the second I told her she was in charge, something in her face lit up.

Ellie loved clothes before Candy decided appearances were weapons. I wanted to give that back to her for a morning.

On the bus, Ellie mentioned she had seen Felicia chatting with Charlotte at Cascades when she picked up breakfast. Felicia and her dad had come back early from their mini-vacation because he had important business in town.

Ellie wondered whether “important business” meant making sure Candy’s party did not end with an emergency-services press conference.

Apparently Charlotte had also made another comment about redheads sticking together, like it was their secret code or something.

I said that sounded threatening.

Ellie said it was cute.

We agreed to remain divided on the issue.

The mall itself happened quickly—mostly because Ellie approached it like a military operation with better lighting and a bus timetable.

She chose a swimsuit I could actually move in, shorts that would survive rocks and damp grass, a loose shirt I could pull on without performing public gymnastics, and shoes suitable for the trail instead of looking pretty beside it.

She also made me try on approximately nine things I did not buy, because apparently efficiency has limits.

I let her choose the final outfit.

Not because I could not have picked something myself.

Because she was happy.

She kept the whole thing in my usual purple orbit too—because she knows me far too well.

We picked up a few things for Willowfen while we were there too, because apparently preparing for one trip by shopping for another is what efficiency looks like in Ellie’s world.

We made the return bus with several minutes to spare, which Ellie treated as proof that the operation had been flawlessly planned rather than proof that she had rushed me through the last shop at terrifying speed.

By the time the bus pulled out of Halifax, she had another iced drink in one hand, shopping bags at her feet, and more color in her face than she had when she woke me.

For a few hours, Three Falls had stopped being Candy’s party.

It had become Ellie’s excuse to go shopping.

No Memory Blasts Before Swimming

My phone buzzed while Ellie was trying to decide whether one spare shirt counted as prepared or optimistic.

Teddy: Phones charged. Power bank packed. No splitting up. No private Candy conversations. Leave if anything feels wrong.

Then, one minute later:

Teddy: And before you ask, “Candy existing” does count as something feeling wrong, but apparently that is not specific enough for the emergency plan.

That was Teddy being reassuring.

He sounded tired even through text—which should not be possible but absolutely was. He confirmed he would watch for social-media posts and save screenshots if anything started moving online.

Chen Print had finally taken on the person from the trial shift for three afternoons a week and Saturdays, but Teddy was still covering part of today.

I gave him one last chance to come with us anyway.

His answer contained language this diary has chosen not to preserve.

The apartment had become two separate packing disasters happening at once.

Three Falls supplies covered one side of the bed: towels, sunscreen, dry clothes, water, snacks, the power bank, Polaroid camera, spare film, and my diary hidden in the secret compartment of my backpack.

Willowfen had taken over the other side with train tickets, hotel confirmation, chargers, toiletries, and the kind of practical lists that make Teddy feel emotionally fulfilled.

Sean’s Seven of Hearts was tucked safely inside my diary with the help paper.

Everything else stayed behind.

Normally, Saturday meant a diary deep dive and discovering what new way Clearwater had found to ruin my childhood.

Not today.

Part of me hated postponing it.

A much larger and more sensible part pointed out that deliberately triggering memory blasts before hiking through Hellgate Forest, swimming in waterfall pools, and spending several hours around Candy Steele was not research.

It was a very complicated suicide note.

We were choosing when to face it, which felt suspiciously like the kind of thing healthy people probably did all the time without needing three notebooks and a bulletin board named Bobby.

For once, postponing the memory blasts was not cowardice.

It was the first intelligent decision any of us had made involving Clearwater and outdoor swimming.

Candy’s Version of Safe

Candy had a clipboard.

Of course she had a clipboard.

Our rideshare driver had spent most of the journey trying to work out why two girls dressed for a pool party needed dropping beside a trail map in the middle of Hellgate Forest.

I did not have an answer that would have improved his afternoon.

By the time me and Ellie reached the gravel trailhead at one-thirty, Candy had turned the place into something between a school trip, a military checkpoint, and a lifestyle-brand launch.

Cars lined the pull-in. Bags were being redistributed. Someone had brought enough bottled water to survive a siege. Candy stood beside the trail map checking names and smiling like she had personally invented responsible fun.

I checked the cars and faces around her.

Rich “The Dick” Cavanagh was nowhere among them. Breaking up with him had at least kept him from Candy’s guest list. That did not make the party safe, but it removed one very specific kind of danger.

“Your dad was very clear about the safety rules,” Candy told Ellie, loudly enough for the parents still hovering near their cars.

Technically true.

Mayor Horton had provided conditions, not approval, and definitely not a ceremonial blessing over Candy Steele’s Forest Pool Extravaganza.

Details.

Ellie’s name had apparently become an emergency spell.

Candy wanted her checking everyone’s water, repeating the upper-pool warning, and helping Sally with the food bags.

The first request almost worked. Ellie started to turn automatically, then reached for my hand instead.

“I’m staying with Penny. But I can remind everyone from here.”

Candy’s smile stayed exactly where it was.

Her eyes did not.

Steve stood beside her in red board shorts and a white T-shirt, carrying two first-aid kits and looking like someone had cast him as Responsible Teenager Number One—without asking whether he wanted the part.

Candy made sure everyone knew he was a trained lifeguard, had brought his truck, and could provide early rides.

Apparently Steve Dillon’s presence meant waterfalls had signed a safety agreement.

We started down Mystic Falls Path in something Candy kept pretending was a loose group.

She moved people forward for photographs, sent others back where the trail narrowed, and tried to place Ellie in the middle so everyone could hear the rules. Then she suggested I walk ahead with Kaelyn and Sally because they were already taking pictures.

We passed the spot where me and Ellie had found the glowing tree crack.

I looked.

Nothing mysterious there.

Just a tree.

I did not investigate.

Personal growth.

Candy was still trying to rearrange us.

She knew what she was doing.

So did we.

“We’re good here,” Ellie said.

That became our strategy.

No argument. No announcement. Just refusing to stand where Candy placed us.

The path was pretty in the highly suspicious way Hellgate Forest is always pretty. Sun through the leaves. Water getting louder ahead. Mossy rocks waiting to murder anyone who trusted them.

The lower pool opened beneath the trees with towels spreading across the grass, bags stacked near the rocks, and photographs happening before anyone had properly arrived.

Candy immediately divided everything into categories.

Food over there.

Dry clothes beneath the trees.

Swimming near Steve.

Pictures by the wide rocks because the light was better.

Ellie was responsibility.

Steve was safety.

Candy was the reason all of it looked organized instead of slightly unhinged.

Then Marilyn came down the trail alone, carrying one bag and dressed like Marilyn Monroe had received an invitation to a forest pool party.

She wore the expression of someone who had decided being stared at was everyone else’s problem.

The conversation around the pool changed for half a second.

Candy greeted her too brightly and indicated a space beside the towels, like Marilyn had been assigned a marked square on the ground.

Marilyn looked at it.

Then chose somewhere else.

Not dramatically. Not enough for Candy to call rude.

Just enough.

That was when I understood what Candy had built.

Not a party.

A picture.

And every person in it already had a place.

The Wrong Photo

The first hour went almost exactly the way Candy wanted.

People swam.

People ate.

Music played from somebody’s speaker at a volume apparently designed to frighten local wildlife.

Photographs happened constantly.

Not casual photographs either. Candy kept fixing them. Moving someone half a step. Calling people back because the light was better. Suggesting a second version where everyone looked more relaxed, which is difficult once someone has instructed you to look relaxed.

I had brought my Polaroid camera and had already taken a few pictures of the waterfall, the pool, Ellie, and one suspiciously photogenic pile of towels.

Candy noticed it almost immediately.

She looked at it with the bemused expression of someone encountering an object that could not automatically upload itself.

“Does that still work?”

“It takes photographs,” I said. “So far, yes.”

She turned toward Steve.

“Take one of us.”

This was apparently not a request.

Steve moved beside her while Candy chose a section of the pool with the waterfall behind them.

I took the photograph.

Candy watched it develop, frowned at the light, and asked for another.

The second one had caught Steve blinking.

The third one met the required standards for preserving their relationship in physical form.

Candy kept that one and immediately returned to managing the rest of us.

Me and Ellie stayed together.

That was the important part.

We swam near the lower edge where the water was calmer, ate food that had spent slightly too long near the sun, and ignored three separate attempts to place Ellie somewhere more useful. Every time Candy called her name, Ellie answered without moving away from me.

It was beautiful.

Then, with a delicate splash, Marilyn rose from the water like a vintage Hollywood icon.

She was supposed to look awkward.

I knew that because Candy kept creating opportunities for her to.

Marilyn had warned me not to come and then arrived anyway, which told me more about how much choice she had than anything Candy could have said.

Except she had arrived in full pageant mode, which made awkward difficult.

Her swimsuit was white and vintage-inspired, the kind of old-Hollywood look that made arriving quietly unlikely.

After Maple Crown—wearing it should probably have felt impossible.

The head judge had died following the crash, after trying to run Marilyn down and missing her when we pulled her clear. She had been exposed in front of the town, stripped of the crown, and left with everyone discussing whether she had ever deserved it in the first place.

Candy clearly expected her to arrive smaller because of that.

Marilyn had chosen cinematic instead.

Candy introduced her too loudly to people who already knew who she was. Asked about Maple Crown in the careful voice people use when pretending gossip is concern. Suggested Marilyn help with the photographs because she was “the expert.”

Marilyn smiled through all of it.

Then she stopped behaving like someone awaiting permission.

She made Kaelyn laugh so hard she nearly dropped her drink. Helped Sally repair a broken sandal strap with a hair tie. Told a story about a Maple Crown sponsor event involving a collapsing floral arch and one extremely committed goose.

I do not know whether the goose was real.

It did not matter.

People started gathering around her because she was funny, not because they wanted to watch her fail.

Candy noticed.

Of course she noticed.

She was standing beside Steve when Marilyn came back from the water, her hair wet and laughing at something Sally had said.

Steve looked over.

That was all.

Except his smile arrived before he remembered he was not supposed to be smiling at her.

Marilyn saw it.

Her expression changed too. Only for a second. Something softer, then gone.

Candy stepped closer to Steve.

Nobody said anything.

The important part was the timing.

Later, Candy decided we needed one final group photograph before everyone started packing.

Most of the party had already left by then, leaving only the people she seemed most interested in arranging.

She chose the wide rocks beside the lower pool because the waterfall would be behind us and the light was still good. Then she began arranging people.

Candy and Steve in the middle.

Ellie beside Candy.

Marilyn near the edge.

Me farther back, where I would still be technically included but could easily be cropped out by anyone feeling creative later.

It was subtle.

Which is Candy’s favorite kind of cruel.

I looked at Ellie.

Candy had placed her exactly where she wanted her: close enough to look claimed, useful, and separate from me.

So I moved before Candy could finish arranging everyone.

“Marilyn, middle.”

Marilyn looked at me.

So did Candy.

I kept my voice light and pointed toward the center.

“The white will look better against the water.”

Then I turned to Steve.

“You’re taller. Behind her.”

It happened quickly enough that people obeyed before they had time to wonder whether I was allowed to be giving instructions.

Marilyn stepped into the center.

Steve moved behind and slightly to one side of her.

I caught Ellie’s hand and pulled her back beside me.

“Candy, that side,” I said. “The light’s better.”

Candy had already spent the afternoon teaching everyone to follow photography directions without questioning them.

For one fatal second, that included mine.

People shifted.

Someone raised a phone.

Someone else started a timer.

By the time Candy understood the picture had changed—stopping it would have meant admitting that the arrangement mattered.

So she smiled.

The camera timer flashed.

At the last second, Marilyn said something I could not hear.

Steve laughed.

The photograph caught that.

It caught Marilyn smiling properly, not pageant-smiling. It caught Steve looking at her instead of Candy. It caught Ellie calm beside me, our shoulders touching. It caught me facing forward instead of hovering at the edge like a warning label.

Candy looked perfect.

She also looked like she had been placed in somebody else’s picture.

The photograph was taken on at least four phones and two digital cameras.

By the time we had gathered our bags and started back along Mystic Falls Path, it was already spreading online.

I saw it over someone’s shoulder first.

Then it appeared in another post.

Then somebody added three red heart emojis beneath Marilyn’s name.

Candy was a few steps ahead of us when her phone buzzed.

She stopped.

Looked down.

Then looked back at me.

She did not say anything.

She did not need to.

The photograph was already out there.

Candy still had her version of the party.

She just did not have the only one.

Sunday, August 9, 2026

One Like, Several Threats

I checked my phone before I was properly awake.

Obviously, I was not checking for the photograph.

I was checking the weather.

The weather had apparently developed several group chats overnight.

Candy’s official recap was already up. Eight polished pictures. Everyone smiling. Water sparkling. Steve looking responsible. Ellie helping with something. Candy placed neatly in the center of almost every frame, like the afternoon had grown around her.

Marilyn’s photograph was not there.

That was fact one.

Fact two was that everyone else seemed to have it.

Then I saw fact three.

Sally had posted it.

Candy had liked it.

No comment. No heart emoji. No fake compliment.

Just the like.

Which should have felt smaller than silence—

It did not.

Teddy had already sent screenshots of the first posts, complete with times and names, because sleep is apparently optional when your best friend believes social media may become evidence.

Teddy: Saved the originals. Don’t engage. Go on vacation.

Good advice, annoyingly.

Ellie held up her phone while I took a Polaroid of the group picture.

Teddy had the digital version covered.

I wanted a physical copy that had a chance of surviving Clearwater. Polaroids had already been harder to erase than almost everything else in our lives.

Backup evidence.

Romantic, really.

Candy had wanted control more than exposure. We had interrupted one part of that.

Now she knew we knew.

Useful.

Terrible, but useful.

There was one small bright spot.

Candy was leaving the following Sunday for a two-week skiing vacation, which meant she would miss the Meridian Cinema Restaurant opening on August 23.

That gave us an opening night without Candy arranging the guest list, correcting the photographs—or standing near Steve like possession could be achieved through shoulder placement.

It did not make us safe.

It just meant she would be dangerous from farther away.

In the meantime, Willowfen was waiting for us.

The train tickets were printed as backups to the digital ones. The booking at the Bellweather Hotel was confirmed. Ellie had packed enough clothes for several possible climates and one minor royal visit.

Candy already had half the town arranged inside her version of yesterday.

She was not getting any luggage space too.

Go Be Tourists

This is the last thing I am writing before Willowfen.

Not because nothing important is going to happen.

Hopefully the opposite.

The apartment is currently in that final stage of packing where everything is technically ready except for the twelve things Ellie keeps remembering.

Gramps has checked that we have everything twice without making it feel like he has checked that we have everything twice.

Mom has been given the approved version: we are going away for a few days, the Bellweather Hotel is lovely, Gramps knows the owner, and we will call when we arrive.

All true.

Just not very complete.

Ellie has checked in with her dad and Felicia. Teddy is on his way to drive us to West Shore Station and has already sent reminders about train tickets, arrival texts, emergency numbers, weather, charging cables, and not accidentally beginning an investigation while on vacation.

He knows me too well.

The Polaroid camera is in my backpack—

This diary is not.

Bobby has been turned into the Bizarre News Bulletin board, which currently means covering several deeply alarming sections with school-project material and pretending it is about strange urban myths instead of evidence that our lives keep trying to become one.

Everything else we cannot leave in sight has gone into the window-seat cache in the purple room.

Teddy has the Truthweaver laptop.

This diary is going behind the AC vent in my old bedroom.

The same place I hid it before Clearwater.

I do not enjoy that comparison.

The last time I deliberately left this diary behind, I was walking into a medical center that erased parts of me and expected the rest to behave.

This time, I am going to a hotel with Ellie.

There will be trains, markets, gardens, swimming, bad tourist decisions, and probably at least one meal Teddy would describe as financially irresponsible.

That should feel different.

It does feel different.

Mostly.

Leaving the diary still makes something inside me tighten. Writing things down has become less of a habit and more of a survival system. If something is in here, then whatever happened belongs somewhere. It cannot be corrected out of me quite as easily.

But taking it would mean carrying Bobby-thinking into Willowfen.

Every strange look would become a clue. Every old building would become suspicious. Every photograph would need examining. I would spend the whole trip trying to preserve it before I had actually lived it.

So the diary stays.

The evidence stays.

Candy stays here too, at least as much as a person can stay anywhere when she owns a phone and considers boundaries a decorative suggestion.

I am taking the Polaroid camera because photographs can be memories without becoming exhibits.

That is the plan, anyway.

Teddy just texted that he is outside.

Ellie is standing by the door with both suitcases, looking tired and excited and more like herself than she did yesterday morning.

I am going to lock the apartment.

I am going to hide this diary behind the AC vent in my old bedroom.

Then I am going to leave Meridia Falls with my girlfriend and try very hard not to solve anything.

We shall go and be tourists.

For once, I think we might.

Friday, August 14, 2026

Last Breakfast, First Goodbye

I am writing this back at the Meridian, which matters because this morning I was still at the Bellweather Hotel and pretending final breakfasts were not a real category of emotional damage.

They are.

We took one last Polaroid at the table because Ellie said the hotel jam deserved documentation.

I said that was not how historical archives worked.

She said I had eaten enough of it to qualify as a primary source.

This is what happens when you go away with someone long enough to develop jokes that did not exist when you arrived.

Packing took longer than it should have because the room had somehow produced more belongings than we had brought into it.

There were postcards, two books from Willowfen Book & Map, a strange little puzzle for Teddy, a tiny enamel frog pin for Squirt, a tin of Bellweather tea for Gramps, the presents Ellie had chosen for her dad and Felicia, receipts we had kept for reasons that seemed important at the time, damp swim things refusing to become dry through optimism, and the Bellweather checkout envelope with everything folded neatly inside.

We knew where the bus stopped now.

We knew which bag held the tickets.

We knew not to sit on the left side of the train if Ellie wanted to see the lake properly before it disappeared.

None of that sounds important—but it was.

On Sunday, every part of the journey had felt like something Teddy had explained because we could not be trusted near public transport without supervision.

Today, we moved through it like people who had done this before.

The local bus took us back to Willowfen Station.

The train carried us away.

Ellie leaned against me for part of the journey, then woke up exactly long enough to claim she had not been asleep.

I did not argue because I value peace.

The announcement for West Shore Station came too quickly.

Gramps was waiting near the entrance with the car and the expression he gets when he is trying not to count whether we still have the same number of limbs as when we left.

He hugged us both, took the heavier suitcase before I could object, and asked how it had been.

“Brilliant,” I said.

Which was a completely useless word for six days of markets, rain, gardens, boats, swimming, too much food, one hotel room, several terrible photographs, and Ellie laughing in ways I had not heard before.

Gramps looked at me for a second.

Then he nodded like I had actually answered.

On the drive back, he mentioned that more restaurant deliveries were arriving over the weekend and Scott had changed the staff-training schedule again. There was something about table layouts and supplier delays, but it washed past me in the warm, familiar way Meridian problems usually do.

Ordinary problems—the kind involving chairs instead of erased memories.

When we came back into Meridia Falls, nothing looked different.

Main Street was still Main Street.

The Meridian was still waiting at the South Bay end of it.

Candy was still here for two more days.

Bobby was still hidden behind a school project.

But Willowfen had happened.

The tickets in my bag said so.

The photographs said so.

The private jokes said so.

Meridia Falls was still home.

It just was not the whole world anymore.

The Parts I’m Writing Down

The apartment currently looks like Willowfen exploded.

Polaroids across the coffee table.

Train tickets under the pizza box.

Receipts nobody needs but neither of us can throw away.

Postcards, two books, the folded Bellweather envelope, the rest of our souvenirs and gifts, and the Willowfen map covered in circles, arrows, and one deeply unfair caricature of me and Ellie in a paddleboat.

I opened this diary for the first time since Sunday.

That is why Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are missing.

Not because nothing happened.

Because too much of it belonged to us before it belonged on paper.

The diary will still keep it. I know that now. The photographs, tickets, receipts, maps, postcards, and all the little things we carried home will do what written pages do when memory tries to slip.

They will hold the shape of it, ready for us to find again if we ever need to. Maybe in a memory blast. Maybe just in the ordinary way people remember the good parts when the world has not stolen them yet.

I just do not need to turn every second into a report.

Monday was when we became tourists.

We got lost on Lantern Row while holding a map. Ellie bought a second map from Willowfen Book & Map because apparently the first one had failed morally.

We ate at the Copper Kettle, where I ordered something based entirely on the word chocolate and discovered that this remains an excellent travel strategy.

Glasshouse Gardens rating: nine out of ten.

One point removed because Ellie took a Polaroid of me standing beside a plant that looked judgmental, and the resemblance was upsetting.

Tuesday was when we stopped treating the trip like recovery.

It was also when my new purple summer dress made its debut.

Yes. Me. In a dress I had chosen voluntarily.

This is what living with Ellie does to a person.

Alder Island had a ferry, a picnic trail, and paddleboats designed by someone who hated dignity.

Ellie did most of the steering.

I did most of the confidently incorrect advice.

There is a photograph someone took of us afterward, with bad hair and ice cream melting faster than we could eat it.

Neither of us looks careful.

That might be one of my favorites.

There was also the pendant.

We found it in one of those little Willowfen shops where everything looked handmade and slightly too nice to touch.

Small black stone. Almost round. Dark-silver edge. Fine chain. Except when the light caught it, there was purple hiding underneath.

I looked at it for slightly too long.

I did not buy it.

Ellie noticed both of those things.

She disappeared back into the shop later and gave it to me that evening.

“It was made for you,” she said.

Which was either extremely romantic or Ellie had just compared me to a slightly uneven black rock.

I am choosing romantic.

I am wearing it now.

I may never take it off.

Wednesday rained.

Proper rain.

The kind that turns every plan into a suggestion and makes old buildings smell like wet stone and gift shops.

There was also supposed to be a solar eclipse that afternoon, which we experienced mainly as the sky becoming slightly more committed to being gray.

Ellie said this still counted.

I remain unconvinced.

We went to the museum, hid in the bookshop, ate cake because weather is not allowed to win, and ended up back at the hotel with hot chocolate and our shoes drying near the heater.

That was when we talked about proof—not Bobby-proof.

The kind that mattered even if nobody else could see it.

Ellie said, “They don’t get to decide which parts of us are real.”

That is the line I am writing down.

The rest is ours.

Thursday felt like the kind of day people mean when they say vacation and then become annoying about it.

We walked by the lake before breakfast. The town was still half asleep and the water looked completely harmless, which was rude considering how much water has done to us lately.

Later there was the lakeside garden, another picnic, one final swim, and dinner at the Bellweather that required clothes that were actually dry.

My new denim skirt made its debut there too, because apparently one voluntary dress had opened a dangerous door.

The last Polaroid from Thursday is Ellie on the Bellweather Promenade at sunset.

She is laughing at me.

I am not writing why.

Some things can stay outside the evidence system.

Willowfen did not solve anything.

Candy still remembers things she should not.

Steve is still trapped inside whatever Candy and the adults around her have built.

Marilyn is still standing in the middle of consequences she did not choose.

Bobby is still waiting behind the Bizarre News Bulletin disguise.

None of that disappeared because we ate too much cake and went on a boat.

But something else happened too.

We learned the bus route.

We found a favorite breakfast table.

We built jokes that only existed because we were there long enough to need them.

We took photographs that were not evidence of danger.

I am keeping the tickets.

I am keeping the map.

I am keeping all the Polaroids.

Especially the one of Ellie laughing.

Not for Bobby.

For us.

Us-proof.

And I am not pinning that to Bobby.

Just You

Ellie’s phone buzzed while we were still sitting on the floor with an open pizza box between us and Willowfen spread across the room.

She looked down.

Then she went still.

Not dramatically. Ellie does not do dramatic unless someone has earned it.

Just enough that I stopped reaching for another slice.

She turned the phone toward me.

Candy: Can you come by tomorrow afternoon before I leave? Need to clear something up. Just you.

No explanation.

No fake smiley face.

No suggestion that I come too.

Just Ellie.

The same Ellie Candy had spent the Three Falls party trying to pull away from me one practical request at a time.

The same rules we had already agreed on.

No splitting up.

No private Candy conversations.

No letting her decide who stood where.

My eyes went from the message to the Polaroid beside Ellie’s knee.

Bellweather Promenade. Sunset. Ellie laughing so hard the picture had blurred slightly.

That happened.

Candy did not get to correct it out of us.

But she was already trying to choose the next frame.

And this time, she wanted Ellie in it alone.

Next week

Diary index

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading. There’s more to come.

If you’d like to talk about this diary entry, you’re welcome to share your thoughts in the chat.

Stay tuned, stay enchanted, and stay connected!

Warmest Regards,

DB

🗝️ Supporting Reader Content

The Affinity Web Chronicles is a reader-supported publication. You can subscribe for free to receive new fiction every Thursday, along with regular updates.

Supporting readers unlock an exclusive Writer’s Commentary, immersive audio, and eBook editions, and help make stories like Penny’s Diary possible.

Subscribe now

Read more

Previous week

Welcome to Penny’s Diary, a contemporary urban-fantasy serial. Read new diary entries every Thursday. Supporting readers can also access a weekly Writer’s Commentary, along with immersive audio and eBook editions, after each entry.

New to Penny’s story? Begin at the very first entry by clicking the button below and step into the moments where everything started to change.

Start at the beginning

Need to catch up?

Read a short guide through Penny’s diary so far — trace what she’s uncovered, what was taken from her, and how the truth keeps slipping out of reach.

Catch Up: The Story So Far

Penny’s Diary stands on its own—but this world holds more stories, waiting when you’re ready.

Explore the AffinityVerse

Saturday, August 1, 2026

Exact Words First

I had told Ellie everything the night before.

Then we called Teddy before either of us could start convincing ourselves Candy had not meant exactly what she said.

He had gone completely quiet when I repeated Candy’s words.

None of us had slept especially well.

The bench.

The smile.

The exact words Candy had used when she told me she remembered Ellie and me before Clearwater turned us back into friends.

Before breakfast, me and Ellie went into the Memory Vault to write it down.

Because apparently pancakes could wait until after evidence preservation.

Rude, but responsible.

Ellie sat beside me on the window seat—close enough that our knees touched. The Web notebook was open between us, still carrying the safe version Clearwater had left behind.

Ellie staying in the purple room.

Ellie being my friend.

Very neat.

Very believable.

Very wrong.

Morning light came through the blind—which made the whole thing feel even less reasonable. Major supernatural evidence should happen at midnight during a storm, not while Cascades was opening and Gramps was probably downstairs thinking about coffee.

My lower back still ached where the three puncture marks had apparently decided permanence was a personality trait. Ellie looked tired too.

Not sleepy-tired.

Clearwater-tired.

Like her body had spent the week arguing with reality and lost several rounds on technicalities.

I wrote Candy’s first sentence exactly as I remembered it:

“I think it’s sweet how quickly you and Ellie fell in love before everyone decided you were just friends.”

Then the second:

“Don’t worry. I’m not judging. I just like knowing what people were before everyone decided otherwise.”

Ellie noticed it first.

“She said everyone decided twice.”

I circled both versions.

We could have spent the whole morning making theories.

Maybe Candy remembered everything. Maybe only us. Maybe she had an anchor. Maybe Clearwater had never touched her in the first place.

Excellent selection of nightmare options.

But none of those were facts.

The facts were smaller.

Candy knew me and Ellie had fallen in love.

Candy knew the world now called us just friends.

Candy had chosen to tell me.

Underneath the quotes, I wrote:

CONFIRMED: Candy remembers our relationship before Clearwater changed it.

Then:

NOT CONFIRMED: anything else.

My handwriting looked too steady.

Ellie read those two lines once.

Then again.

“She could’ve kept that advantage,” she said quietly. “You’d never have known.”

That landed.

Candy had not slipped.

She had not been confused.

She had wanted me to know she remembered.

Pancake Evidence

Once Candy’s exact words were safely trapped in the Web notebook, we did the only sensible thing left.

We took the Willowfen brochure to Cascades and ordered pancakes.

Ellie had already told her dad and Felicia at lunch yesterday that she was staying in Meridia Falls with me instead of going on their family vacation.

Which was lovely.

And also made me feel like I had somehow stolen her from a perfectly normal family trip involving lakes, ice cream, and nobody being erased by supernatural forces.

So now we were choosing somewhere else to go together.

Because apparently major life decisions require syrup.

Honestly, believable.

We got our usual upstairs booth, which was the official location for cupcakes, emotional damage, suspicious planning, and now selecting somewhere to disappear for a few days without technically disappearing.

The brochure covered half the table.

Willowfen Lake.

The Bellweather Hotel.

Gardens, old streets, little ferry trips, and enough cheerful photography to make me assume at least one swan had been threatened into posing.

Ellie was doing practical things like checking travel times and whether the hotel had breakfast included.

I was ranking locations by likelihood of being haunted.

Different skills.

Strong team.

Candy was still there in the background of everything. Not physically, thankfully. Just in the way my brain kept taking nice things and checking underneath them for wires.

But she did not get the whole morning.

That mattered.

Ellie leaned against my shoulder while we argued over whether a garden town counted as a real vacation if there were no roller coasters. Her hand rested near mine on the table, close enough that our fingers kept bumping beside the brochure.

Not friends.

Not whatever Clearwater had filed us under.

Us.

Charlotte brought the pancakes and noticed the brochure before the plates had fully landed.

She asked where we were thinking of going, and Ellie gave her the short version while I protected the syrup from becoming public property.

Then Charlotte pulled out her phone.

Felicia had been sending her photos from the mini family vacation.

Nothing dramatic.

A lake view.

Felicia holding an ice cream that had already started melting down her hand.

Ellie’s dad standing beside a sign with the expression of a man who had been told the photograph would take two seconds and no longer believed anyone.

Ellie smiled at that one.

A real smile.

Small, but real.

Charlotte flicked to another photo of Felicia wearing sunglasses and grinning into the wind.

“Redheads have to stick together,” she said.

Ellie gave her a look that was mostly amused and only slightly offended on behalf of redhead exclusivity rules.

Then Charlotte went back downstairs before the pancakes could become cold enough to count as a crime.

That was when it hit me.

Felicia was sending Charlotte vacation photos.

Not random ones either. The kind you sent someone because you wanted them included.

Felicia and Charlotte had somehow become actual friends.

Felicia looked happy in the photos.

Charlotte had looked happy showing us.

Not helpful-friendly.

Not convenient-friendly.

Actually friendly.

Changing Variables

Teddy arrived at the Memory Vault after lunch with iced coffee, a bag of sour candy, and the expression of someone who had already been awake too long for a Saturday.

He said we needed a counterbalance to the box of deep-dive cupcakes sitting on the bed.

Sour candy against sweet cupcakes.

Very balanced.

Very scientific.

Then we started with Candy.

The person, not the bag.

Teddy reread the exact words from the Web notebook without saying them aloud.

Which was appreciated.

Once had been threatening.

Twice had been evidence.

A third time would have started feeling like Candy was in the room with us.

We added the quotes to Bobby under CONFIRMED, then surrounded them with the much smaller list of things we actually knew.

Candy remembered Ellie and me falling in love.

Candy knew the world had changed us into friends.

Candy wanted me to know.

Everything else stayed under question marks where it belonged.

How much did Candy remember?

Maybe all of it.

Maybe even Jemma Landry.

Very responsible.

Very unlike my brain.

Then we opened Younger Penny’s fifth diary.

Teddy opened the Matrix notebook while Ellie took my hand.

I touched the first page.

And Clearwater replaced the room.

One second I was in the Memory Vault.

The next, I was small again.

Younger me sat on the edge of a narrow bed while a nurse asked whether her stomach still hurt. Logan had been taken away for an “individual check,” and nobody would tell her when he was coming back.

The memory did not feel like watching.

It felt like being there.

My stomach cramped with hers.

Ellie was still holding my hand, seeing everything Younger Penny saw and feeling what she felt.

Younger me could not feel her.

But I could.

The Memory Vault came back with both of us breathing too quickly.

Ellie gave Teddy the overview for the Matrix.

Logan removed.

Stomach pain.

Adults recording symptoms.

No clear return time.

Then I touched the next page.

Clearwater again.

This time Logan was there, but Eleanor was not.

Then another page.

Eleanor beside Younger Penny.

Logan somewhere else.

Then neither of them.

The rooms changed.

The calm voices did not.

Clearwater kept separating us in different combinations and recording what happened afterward.

Headaches.

Shaking hands.

Panic.

Memories turning fuzzy around the edges.

How long Younger Penny took to calm down.

What changed when they finally let someone back in.

One memory began with Younger Penny already crying.

So me and Ellie were crying before we even understood why.

She had asked three times when Eleanor was coming back.

Then stopped asking because she wanted to be good.

The thought inside her head was painfully simple.

I was good all morning, but they still didn’t let me see Eleanor.

The loss hit before I could prepare for it—not ordinary missing-someone.

Something deeper.

Like the whole room had become unstable because Eleanor was not inside it.

When the Memory Vault returned, tears were already running down both our faces.

Ellie did not let go while she gave Teddy the overview.

“I was there somewhere,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “They knew Penny needed me, and they kept me away anyway.”

I wanted to say something useful.

Apparently my supply had been recalled.

Teddy drew three columns in the Matrix notebook.

LOGAN
ELEANOR
ALONE

Ellie gave him the memories one at a time, and he tracked the patterns beneath them.

Headaches.

Stomach pain.

Panic.

Memory getting fuzzy.

Time needed to recover.

What happened when Logan or Eleanor returned.

That part was almost worse.

The reunions brought relief first.

Then exhaustion.

Younger me would calm down, then crash.

Sleep for hours.

Cry afterward without knowing why.

In one memory, Logan came back and the room finally stopped moving.

In another, Eleanor took Younger Penny’s hand and the words in my head lined up properly again.

Clearwater had recorded all of it.

Not the way someone writes down that a frightened child needs help.

The way someone records results.

Bobby gained a new cluster.

FIFTH DIARY—SPLIT TESTS
Paired with Logan.
Paired with Eleanor.
Isolated.
Symptoms worse during separation.
Relief after reunion.
Then exhaustion.

Teddy added questions beneath it.

Attachment response?
Loss response?
Individual performance?
What happened without stabilizing people?

I hated that last one most.

Teddy stared at the columns for a long time before he spoke.

“They weren’t checking whether you were okay.”

His pen tapped once beside ALONE.

“They were changing variables to see what broke.”

Not Going

The Three Falls post buzzed on Ellie’s phone while we were packing up after the deep dive.

Teddy was still standing in front of Bobby with the Matrix notebook in his hand.

Perfect timing.

Candy had added another planning update to the Three Falls group chat Ellie was in, written in the bright, cheerful voice people use when they are definitely not arranging everyone like furniture.

Candy had arranged rides to the trailhead.

Nobody would be left alone.

Steve would help with swimming safety.

There would be group photographs.

Everyone should stay together so they could “make memories.”

After the fifth diary, that last part did not sound sweet.

It sounded like instructions.

Candy had not written my name.

She did not need to.

The whole post felt aimed at the space where I was supposed to place myself.

Ellie assigned logistics.

Steve assigned safety and transport.

Marilyn being pulled back into Candy’s orbit.

Me still blank.

A variable waiting to be filled in.

“I am not going to the party.”

The sentence came out steadier than I felt.

Ellie did not tell me I had to.

Teddy nodded and said nothing would get him there either, like the decision had been entered into the correct column.

Then he left before dinner, and me and Ellie stopped investigating because there is a point where continuing to stare at evidence stops being responsible and starts becoming a very specific type of self-harm.

So that was that.

After dinner, movie night happened in the apartment with too many snacks and no documentaries, mysteries, missing-person plots, memory loss, secret organizations, or charming villains who turned out to be running psychological experiments.

Our standards have become complicated.

Ellie curled against me beneath the blanket, her head on my shoulder and one hand loosely around mine.

For a few hours neither of us was a stabilizing person.

Neither of us was a variable.

Neither of us was responsible for keeping the other attached to reality.

We were just us.

That should have settled it.

I was not going.

Except Candy had already assigned everyone else a place.

And I was starting to wonder whether staying away was exactly where she wanted me.

Sunday, August 2, 2026

Missing From the Pew

I walked Ellie to church as usual.

Then I waited in the hot morning air with an iced coffee, my diary in my backpack, and the deeply suspicious feeling that everyone inside the chapel was probably becoming a better person without me.

Ellie usually came out with her dad and Felicia.

Today she came out with Charlotte.

That was the first thing I noticed.

The second was the way Ellie glanced behind Charlotte before she looked for me.

Only for a second.

Her dad and sister were still away on their mini vacation, and Ellie had been the one who chose not to go.

She had chosen to stay here with me.

Willowfen had come afterward.

Apparently choices can still hurt when they are the right ones.

Charlotte said something that made Ellie smile as they crossed toward the park. I could not hear it, but it looked easy between them.

Not forced church politeness.

Not Felicia’s friend being nice to Felicia’s sister because social rules demanded it.

Just easy.

Charlotte waved when she saw me, then told Ellie she would send her the rest of Felicia’s photos later.

“Apparently she’s documenting every dessert,” Ellie said after Charlotte left. “Dad has become background scenery.”

“That feels like a healthy use of mayoral authority.”

Ellie smiled again, but it faded quickly.

I moved closer on the bench until our shoulders touched.

That was all.

No questions about whether she regretted staying.

No speech about how she was allowed to miss them.

Ellie already knew both things, and making her explain would only turn the ache into homework.

She slipped her hand into mine instead.

Families were still coming out of church in small groups.

Parents.

Children.

Grandparents.

People arguing about lunch while pretending they were not.

Ellie watched them for a moment.

Then she leaned against me.

She had chosen to stay.

That did not mean she had stopped missing the people who left.

Public Weirdness Department

In the afternoon, Teddy came over because we technically still had a Media Studies project to do.

This was rude.

Also accurate.

Apparently school assignments do not pause because reality has developed structural problems.

The original idea had been vague.

Something local.

Mysterious architecture. Urban legends. Stories that would not make our teacher regret assigning group work.

Ellie had even made a heading for it and stuck it to Bobby before Clearwater.

MERIDIA FALLS: MEMORY, MYTH, AND LOCAL STORIES.

Now we had somewhere to start.

Not with Bobby material.

Absolutely not with Bobby material.

But with stories that could make Bobby look less like a secret evidence board if anyone ever found him.

Meridia Falls had enough strange history, urban legends, unsolved incidents, odd landmarks, and stories people told differently depending on who was asked.

And we did not have to stop at Meridia Falls.

We could go wider once we had enough to work with.

We could research those stories without publishing anything dangerous.

The public version of weird.

Teddy started outlining what the site would need.

Pages.

Categories.

Sources.

Image permissions.

Other words that made the whole thing sound alarmingly real.

Ellie began drawing logo ideas in her sketchbook.

I claimed research and writing, mostly because the alternative involved understanding website architecture.

Then I looked at Bobby.

Not directly at first.

Just enough to see the photographs, notes, arrows, names, dates, and questions spreading from Bobby across the wall.

If anyone ever saw it, “secret evidence board tracking memory experiments and supernatural crimes” would be difficult to explain.

“Research board for our weird-history website” was almost believable.

Almost.

The website would not contain our real evidence.

No Clearwater records.

No Seven Trees tape.

No Candy files.

No names that could get someone hurt.

Bobby stayed private.

But the project gave him a costume.

Teddy liked that enough to write PUBLIC MATERIAL ONLY across the top of the planning page.

Ellie added a tiny eye beside it.

We did not settle on a name.

Every suggestion was either boring, embarrassing, or sounded like three middle-aged men discussing ghosts on local radio.

So we left it.

Future Us could suffer.

Doctor Who night happened afterward—because Sundays still belonged to Ellie whenever possible.

Tonight was The Celestial Toymaker, which meant an old missing story brought back through animation, because apparently even television episodes can disappear and then return looking slightly different.

Very normal.

Completely unrelated to anything in our lives.

Ellie spent the first ten minutes explaining why the Toymaker mattered and Teddy spent the next ten arguing that the animation counted as preservation, not replacement.

I mostly watched the two of them enjoying themselves.

Then I laughed.

A real laugh.

Not the kind I use when something is horrifying and I need my face to do literally anything else.

For one evening, the Memory Vault was just a room with snacks, blankets, Ellie leaning against me, and Teddy having strong opinions about animated reconstruction.

An ordinary Sunday survived.

Monday, August 3, 2026

Town Pretending to Be Normal

Natal Day made Meridia Falls look harmless.

Flags along Main Street.

Music on the boardwalk.

Families carrying paper trays of food through the park while children ran around with painted maple leaves on their cheeks and the confidence of people who had never had their memories medically reorganized.

Honestly, adorable.

Me and Ellie moved through the crowd without a plan beyond food and not spending the whole day inside the Memory Vault.

For a while, I nearly enjoyed myself.

The town was loud enough to drown out thinking.

Every few steps, somebody was taking a photograph.

Parents lining up children.

Couples leaning together.

Friends throwing their arms around each other while someone shouted for them to move closer.

Normal proof that people had been there.

We wandered down Main Street toward the boardwalk.

Teddy found us near the food stalls.

Then I saw Steve.

He was standing near one of the community booths with Candy and a few others from school. Candy was talking to Anne Harrison from Cascades while Steve carried drinks and helped move a folding table out of the walkway.

Useful.

Polite.

Dependable.

Someone called them together for a photograph.

Candy moved closer to him before it was taken.

Steve smiled a second late—probably nobody else noticed.

The caption appeared online before we reached the next food stand.

Something about Natal Day, amazing friends, and being grateful for people who always helped keep everyone safe.

No mention of Three Falls.

It did not need one.

Steve was already being introduced as the responsible one.

The boyfriend parents trusted.

The lifeguard.

The person who made the party feel safe before it had even happened.

Ellie looked at my phone, then across the crowd toward him.

“We should save it.”

I took the screenshot.

Around us, people kept laughing, eating, posing, and making memories in bright public places.

I had thought crowds made it harder to hurt someone without being seen.

Candy understood the opposite.

A crowd did not stop her from creating a version.

It gave her witnesses.

The First Version

We started collecting possible website stories after lunch.

Not real stories.

Safe weirdness.

Local legends, old buildings, strange newspaper clippings, and things people could read without accidentally learning their childhood memories had been edited by medical professionals.

The bar was low.

I was looking at Bobby for inspiration when I noticed Sapphire Bliss’s card still pinned near the Collins family material.

Plain white.

QR code on one side.

Warnings on the other.

THE FIRST VERSION
Do not search from inside the radius.
Print before refreshing.
Do not use a personal device.

Very relaxed blogging strategy.

Me and Ellie had met Sapphire in the park almost two months ago. She had shown us a protected newspaper clipping, let us see it disintegrate on a bench, explained that Meridia Falls had a suppression radius, and handed us the card like disappearing evidence was a normal occupational hazard.

Her blog was not safe website material.

Obviously.

But Sapphire knew how to write about impossible things without immediately announcing that reality was broken.

That part might help.

“We could look at how she presents the stories,” I said. “Structure. Tone. How much she explains.”

Teddy looked from me to the card.

“Using Truthweaver.”

“Obviously.”

“And we don’t follow anything away from the blog.”

“Still obviously.”

He gave me the look that meant my historical relationship with obviously was under review.

Teddy set up a temporary protected route through the Truthweaver laptop, then used the QR code instead of searching for the site.

It redirected twice.

Then four more times.

The final page looked almost unfinished.

Plain background.

Black text.

No author photograph.

No menu worth trusting.

Teddy checked the address, the redirects, and several other things involving code and professional distrust.

“It’s safe enough to read for now,” he said. “But this route looks temporary.”

Comforting contribution achieved.

At the top, it said The First Version.

The newest post was about corrections.

Not ordinary typo corrections.

The kind where a report changed after publication and the revised version removed the one detail that had made everyone uncomfortable.

Another post said people often appeared irrational when the pressure controlling their behavior remained hidden.

That one made me stop.

Steve smiling a second late in photographs.

Marilyn still being pulled into Candy’s plans.

Candy telling me the truth about Ellie and me with the confidence of someone holding evidence I could not explain.

The world calling us friends because that was the version Clearwater had left behind.

None of those things made sense if you only looked at the clean version.

The posts did not use names I recognized.

No dramatic claims about secret organizations.

No convenient explanation of who was changing the records or why.

Just careful notes about altered reports, corrected timelines, and one rule repeated in different forms:

Save what appeared first.

Ellie took screenshots while I copied two ideas into our website notes.

The original version showed what somebody had decided needed correcting.

And behavior stopped looking irrational once you found the pressure behind it.

I tried opening another post.

The page refreshed.

Everything went white.

Then The First Version disappeared.

The address redirected to a bland travel page about coastal walking routes—which felt almost insulting.

Teddy scanned the QR code again.

Same travel page.

He checked the redirects, then whatever temporary code the site had left behind.

“I don’t think it disappeared,” he said. “I think the QR code opened a timed session.”

“Meaning?”

“We got one access window. Once it expired, the route closed and replaced itself with something harmless.”

“Can we open it again?”

“Probably. Just not immediately. There’s some kind of cooldown attached to the code or the route we used.”

Very relaxed blogging strategy remained accurate.

We still had the screenshots.

I looked from them to Candy’s exact wording in the Web notebook.

I had been treating what she said like a riddle we needed to solve.

Maybe that was not the first job.

Maybe the first job was making sure nobody could correct it later.

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

Print-Shop Breathing Room

Me and Ellie took a walk after lunch and ended up at Chen Print.

Technically, we had gone to say hi.

Also technically, checking whether Teddy had remembered food now counted as friendship maintenance.

A help-wanted notice was taped beside the door.

Not a dramatic one.

No bold red letters.

No cheerful stock photograph of people pretending employment was a group adventure.

Just:

PART-TIME HELP NEEDED
Afternoons and Saturdays.
Ask for May.

Which was somehow more convincing.

Ellie noticed it before we went inside.

Teddy noticed us noticing it and immediately looked suspicious, like his family had been caught doing something reckless.

“Mum’s already had applications,” he said.

Meaning May had already started the hiring process, and Teddy was still adjusting to the idea that Chen Print might not need him for everything.

The shop was busy in an ordinary way.

Boxes beside the delivery door.

A printer making the sort of noise that suggested it had developed personal grievances.

Teddy packing a batch of wedding invitations for collection.

May behind the counter with a clipboard, sorting applications into piles while answering a customer’s third question about paper thickness.

Squirt sat at the worktable arranging stacks of school-event flyers by color.

She looked up when we came in.

I signed hello.

She signed back, then pointed at the flyer pile Teddy had apparently put in the wrong order and gave him a look of deep professional disappointment.

Teddy defended himself in sign.

Squirt remained unconvinced.

Strong management structure.

May had two interviews booked for Wednesday and another applicant coming in for a trial afternoon later in the week.

She said it casually—like hiring someone to help keep the shop functioning was a normal Tuesday task.

Maybe it was.

It still felt like the panic loosening its grip.

Jin’s treatment had started.

Which meant more appointments, more Halifax trips, medication schedules, waiting rooms, and a new collection of words none of us wanted to become good at using.

But the immediate disaster had eased enough for Chen Print to pay someone else to carry part of the load.

Not fixed.

Better.

There is apparently a whole country between those words.

Teddy had been handling deliveries, supply runs, late jobs, and whatever else appeared whenever a family business became a family emergency.

May came around the counter and handed him the collection sheet.

Then she took it back.

“I’ll do this one,” she said.

Teddy opened his mouth.

May looked at him.

He closed it again.

Strong family communication.

Squirt signed something from the table.

Teddy looked offended.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“That Mum should hide the car keys.”

Squirt nodded firmly.

Reasonable.

Ellie asked whether Teddy wanted to come over later and work on the website.

For a second, I expected the usual calculation.

Shop.

Home.

His dad.

Deliveries.

Whether being with us counted as abandoning something more important.

Instead, he glanced at May.

She looked at the help-wanted notice and the application piles, then pointed him toward the door.

Teddy nodded.

“Yeah. I can.”

The answer came too quickly for him to regret it.

That was the change.

Not that everything was okay.

Not that Jin was safe or Chen Print had stopped needing him.

Just that Teddy had enough room to say yes before responsibility filled the space.

Naming the Weird

Teddy arrived with what he called a website skeleton.

It was mostly boxes, menus, and blank spaces where future competence would apparently go.

We had already agreed on the important part.

Public weirdness only.

No Clearwater.

No Bobby evidence.

No Candy files.

Nothing involving the words memory rewrite, secret medical program, or why does my skin glow under UV light?

Very restrictive editorial policy.

The name took longer.

Most of our suggestions sounded either too serious, too childish, or like a podcast hosted by men with expensive microphones and strong opinions about lake monsters.

Ellie looked up from her sketchbook.

“What about something connected to Bobby?”

That made sense.

Bobby had started as the Board of Bizarre, shortened to BOB, then somehow become Bobby and gained a full personality.

But the website needed its own version.

Public stories.

Local mysteries.

News nobody sensible would consider news.

“The Bizarre News Bulletin,” I said.

Teddy looked at me.

Ellie repeated it.

“The Bizarre News Bulletin.”

It sounded official enough to submit for school and ridiculous enough to belong to us.

So that was it.

Teddy shortened it to BNB before either of us had time to object.

He started building the homepage and basic sections.

I claimed research and short articles.

Ellie took graphics, layout, and anything requiring taste.

Then she turned her sketchbook around.

She had drawn an eye based on my diary stamp.

Cleaner.

With a globe as the iris.

Something that could sit beside the site title without looking like we were warning people they had entered a cursed archive.

“We could use this,” she said. “Make the stamp part of the logo.”

A symbol I had used to mark things I could not afford to lose, turned into something public and harmless.

I liked that more than I expected.

Then Ellie’s phone buzzed.

Candy.

Of course it was.

Her message was cheerful, grateful, and written as though Ellie had already agreed to join her and the rest of the Candy Gang.

Planning session tomorrow afternoon.

Final arrangements.

Everyone needed to know their jobs before Saturday.

Candy had even added a heart.

Very normal.

Not threatening at all.

All the while, Teddy was adding sections to the website menu.

Stories.

Places.

Archives.

Every section had a purpose.

Every box had somewhere it was supposed to lead.

I looked at Candy’s message again.

Ellie had already been assigned tomorrow afternoon.

Everyone needed to know their jobs.

Candy was organizing people the same way Teddy was organizing pages.

One assigned function at a time.

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Don’t Go

Ellie was at Candy’s for the Three Falls planning session.

Teddy was helping at Chen Print.

So I went to Cascades for lunch, because sitting alone in the Memory Vault while Bobby stared at me did not feel like a healthy use of Wednesday afternoon.

Marilyn was sitting at the back table.

She had an iced coffee she was not touching.

No crown.

No sash.

No polished Maple Crown smile.

Just Marilyn, looking tired enough that I almost asked whether she was okay.

Almost.

I carried my lunch over.

Before I could sit down—she said, “Don’t go.”

No hello.

Apparently we had progressed beyond social niceties and into warnings.

“To Three Falls?” I asked.

She gave me a look suggesting there were not several other forest parties currently ruining both our lives.

I sat across from her.

Marilyn did not explain everything.

She talked around the edges, which was still more than she usually gave me.

Candy liked public places.

She liked witnesses.

She liked photographs taken before anyone realized they were evidence.

A person could object afterward, Marilyn said, but by then everyone had already seen the smiling group photo.

The friendly caption.

The arm around the shoulder.

The moment that made the victim look jealous or unstable for saying it had not been like that.

“People believe the picture,” she said. “Then they decide you’re dramatic for explaining what happened outside it.”

That sounded practiced.

Not rehearsed.

Learned.

I thought about Maple Crown.

Sponsor walls.

Official photographs.

Polished statements.

A title that made every crack in Marilyn’s image look like proof she had never deserved it.

I also thought about the boardwalk.

The false crash story.

The way Marilyn had stood inside a lie because the truth was impossible.

“Is Candy planning something for the party?”

“I don’t know.”

Marilyn said it too quickly for me to think she was hiding the exact answer.

But I also believed her.

That was the problem.

She knew the shape of Candy’s damage.

Not necessarily which version was coming next.

“Why warn me?”

Her expression closed immediately.

There it was.

The wall.

“Don’t make this into something it isn’t.”

“I was going to say thank you.”

“Don’t do that either.”

Very Marilyn.

“Are you going?”

She nodded.

“Yes. I don’t have the luxury of choice.”

Then she stood before I could ask why she was going if Three Falls was dangerous.

Or what part Candy had already assigned her.

Or what happened if Marilyn tried to say no.

She stopped at the doorway.

Only for a second.

Then she left.

I watched her go and understood the part she had not said.

Marilyn was warning me away from something she could not stay away from herself.

Thursday, August 6, 2026

House Still There

After breakfast, me and Ellie went home to prove the house still existed.

That sounds dramatic.

It was mostly mail, thirsty plants, and one flyer promising twenty percent off gutter cleaning, which felt like a threat from adulthood.

The house was not abandoned.

It was paused.

Mom’s mug was still beside the coffee machine. Her coat was still hanging by the door even though she had taken the useful one with her. A shopping list stayed attached to the fridge with one of the fruit-shaped magnets she had owned since before I was born.

Normal things waiting for someone to come back and continue them.

I collected the mail while Ellie watered the plants.

She knew which ones needed barely any water and which ones behaved like neglect was a personal betrayal, because apparently she had been paying attention during all the times I had complained about them.

Useful girlfriend knowledge.

Slightly alarming.

We opened the windows long enough to make the rooms smell less closed.

Sean’s Seven of Hearts was in my pocket.

I had started carrying it without deciding to—sometimes I touched the edge just to check it was still there.

I called Mom from the kitchen while Ellie sorted the mail into useful, junk, and probably-adulthood.

The conversation stayed safely ordinary.

She talked about the seminar, one of the other attendees who apparently asked questions by giving speeches, and the food being better than expected. I told her the Meridian restaurant preparations were getting serious.

Then Mom asked whether everything had been okay since Clearwater.

There it was.

The question with an entire wrong week hiding behind it.

I looked at her mug beside the coffee machine.

Ellie looked at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just tired.”

Not exactly a lie.

Not close enough to the truth to be useful.

I did not tell her Clearwater had rewritten Ellie and me.

I did not tell her Candy remembered the version of us everyone else had lost.

I did not tell her I was considering going to a forest party because staying away might be part of somebody else’s plan.

We both accepted the versions we had been given.

After the call, Ellie came closer and slipped her hand into mine.

No questions.

She already knew what I had left out.

We locked the door when we left.

The house was still mine.

It just was not the place where I felt safest anymore.

Scott Has Clipboards

After lunch, me and Ellie made it as far as the bedroom before deciding that checking on a closed-up house during a hot, humid morning counted as exhausting physical labor.

An afternoon snooze had been approved.

Then my phone buzzed.

Gramps: Can you both come down to the restaurant? Got some important news.

Important news from Gramps could mean anything from the ovens have arrived to I have accidentally invited an internationally famous person to dinner.

So we abandoned the snooze, made ourselves look slightly less melted, and went downstairs.

Gramps introduced us to Scott Mercer.

Scott was holding three clipboards.

This felt important.

One clipboard suggested organization.

Three suggested he had opinions about napkin storage.

Scott was the new manager of the Meridian Cinema Restaurant.

Not possible manager.

Not future manager.

Actual manager, already working toward the August 23 opening.

Seventeen days away.

Apparently everyone downstairs knew the exact number and had developed feelings about it.

Menu drafts covered one table.

Staff interview times filled a schedule beside the bar.

Supplier deliveries had dates.

The kitchen equipment had inspection stickers.

A seating plan was taped to the wall beside a list titled OPENING NIGHT—FINAL DECISIONS, which felt aggressively real.

Nearby, two people were having a serious discussion about linen colors.

Ordinary problems.

Beautiful, boring, solvable problems.

Scott shook both our hands, asked one sensible question about noise carrying into the apartments, then went straight back to checking whether the glassware delivery had been confirmed.

I liked him immediately.

Not in an interesting way.

In a please continue preventing Gramps from doing six jobs at once way.

Gramps looked lighter with Scott there.

Still busy.

Still checking everything.

Still pretending opening a cinema restaurant was a normal retirement activity.

But lighter.

Then Gramps showed us the part he had clearly been waiting to reveal.

Curved booths ran around the outer walls of the restaurant.

There were no real windows in here.

Apparently Gramps had taken that personally.

Each booth had what Gramps kept calling a faux window built into the wall—except faux window was seriously underselling it.

They were screens hidden behind deep, dark frames, bright enough and detailed enough to make the restaurant look like it opened onto somewhere else.