The bedroom door was closer to the corner than it should have been. Every morning, muscle memory gave Fiona eight steps from wardrobe to door. Tonight, her foot landed on the seventh. Her skin prickled.
She dug the estate agent’s particulars from her recipe folder at midnight, squinting at the floor plan by phone torch light. Eight feet. Exactly as memory dictated. A floorboard groaned behind her, and the flat held its breath.
Tuesday morning, brushing her teeth, she noticed the reflection in the living room window doubled. The building opposite loomed too close, brick pressing where open space should have been.
She reached for the kitchen light switch and burned her palm on the kettle. Her fingers grazed empty wall until she stretched to meet the switch. “Work stress,” she muttered, running her hand under cold water. The room throbbed in concert with her pulse.
Wednesday, she measured everything. Bathroom door: three inches left. Hallway: half a foot narrower. Each shift twisted her stomach into knots as she scribbled measurements on receipts like evidence in a case that made no sense.
That evening, she called her sister. “Do you remember our old house? Maple Street?”
“Of course. Why?”
“The layout. Describe it for me.”
“Front door straight into the living room, stairs on the right, and upstairs the—”
Fiona hung up, hands shaking.
Thursday morning brought a mirror that hadn’t existed the night before. Not her modern rectangular one, but a small oval with tarnished silver edges—the mirror from her childhood bedroom.
She backed away, stumbling against furniture no longer where she’d placed it. The bed nearer the window. The wardrobe where her desk should have been. Everything smaller, cramped, arranged with the careless indifference of parents who’d never asked what their daughter needed.
Friday brought pencilled height marks climbing the doorframe, dated in her mother’s careful script. ‘Fiona, age 6.’ ‘Fiona, age 7.’ ‘Fiona, age 8.’
She pressed against the smooth front door. No lock. No escape. The bed, the wardrobe, the pencilled marks—Maple Street again. The woman who’d fled at eighteen, who’d built a life three counties away, who’d sworn never to return—gone.
When she faced the mirror, it was the eight-year-old girl who stared back.
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