I Found a Mirror That Answers Anything I Ask. It Always Takes Something.

I held Claire’s brass mirror in both hands and kept my face close to it. The bedroom was dark except for the desk lamp beside me, and the window had gone black with January. Cold pressed against the glass. The house made its usual noises around me, pipes ticking and the furnace coming on downstairs.

I’d already asked the mirror four questions. I knew better than to ask a fifth. But the bank’s second letter was on my desk, and the foreclosure date was eleven days away. Dad had lost his machine-shop job in March. The arrears had grown while he looked for another one, and there wasn't enough money in any account to make them disappear.

So I looked at the reflection. It looked back at me from the old glass, pale and stretched by the curve of the mirror. My hand was shaking a little. I tightened my grip.

"Just enough to keep the house."

I barely whispered it. I was still forming the last word when the reflection finished it. Its lips closed. Mine were still moving. For one second we stayed that way.

The reflection looked like it knew something I didn't. Then my hand slipped and the mirror dropped an inch before I caught it against my chest. The brass edge hit my wrist. I stood up too fast and knocked my knee against the desk. Nothing happened.

The lamp stayed on. The furnace kept running. Outside, a car went past on the road and its headlights moved across the ceiling. I stared at the mirror. I must've said it too fast.

I was tired, and the room was dark, and I'd been looking at my own face for too long. The other answers had been followed by things going missing. The class hamster disappeared first. Then the neighbor's dog. After that, a photograph vanished from our hallway, leaving a clean rectangle on the wall where the frame had been.

The last thing was a word. I knew there had been a word. I knew I used to know it. Nothing came back when I tried to find it. I didn't know if the questions caused any of that.

I wrapped the mirror in the old wax paper before I could change my mind. The paper had softened at the folds and smelled faintly like dust. I folded it over the brass frame, then slid the bundle into the desk drawer. Claire's card was still sitting beside the bank letter. I picked it up and read the lines I'd already read enough times to remember most of them.

The mirror took something of equal weight. The person asking couldn't choose what it kept. That part had seemed strange when I first found the card. Now it seemed clear. I put the card back in the drawer and closed it.

I decided I wouldn't look at the mirror again until morning. I wasn't sure what morning was supposed to change, but I needed there to be a next step that didn't involve standing in the dark with a piece of brass in my hands. The question had been accepted. At eleven fifty-eight, I was in bed with the blanket pulled up to my chin.

The wall between my room and my parents' room was thin enough that I could hear them talking if they kept their voices low. Ember was the one who started. Her voice came through in pieces. She asked how much was left after the bank took the next payment. Logan answered that he didn't know yet.

Then he said he could call them in the morning and ask for another week. There was a pause. Ember said the deadline was January twenty-fifth. Logan told her he knew. They talked about the truck after that.

The gas. The payment. Whether selling it would help or just leave him without a way to get to work if he found another job. Logan kept bringing things back to numbers, like the right number might fix the rest. Ember asked if they could stay in the house after the deadline.

Logan didn't answer right away. I lay still and watched the dark ceiling. The reflection's mouth closing before mine kept coming back. I could see it as clearly as I could see the lamp, even though the lamp was across the room and the mirror was behind the drawer. I couldn't cancel the question.

Through the wall, Ember said the house had been in the family too long to lose. Logan told her they weren't losing it tonight. Then they went quiet for a while, and I heard the bed creak as one of them moved. The brass mirror stayed wrapped in its wax paper inside my desk drawer.

I didn't sleep. I stayed in bed until dawn with the blanket pulled up to my chin, listening to the house settle and waiting for something to change. Nothing did. At six thirty-seven, Mom started crying in the kitchen. I got up and went downstairs.

She was standing by the table with a certified letter in both hands. Dad stood beside her, still wearing the clothes he'd slept in. The coffee maker was running, but neither of them had poured a cup. Mom looked at me when I came in.

"The house is ours," she said.

Her face was wet. "We're not losing it."

It was from an insurance company. A policy on his brother had turned up after nine years, somehow. The payment was for forty-one thousand dollars. I knew that number. It was the number I'd asked the mirror for.

The arrears on the house were just under that. Enough to make the bank stop calling. Mom kept reading parts of the letter out loud, then going back to the first page. Dad said he didn't remember the policy. He said his brother had been dead nine years and nobody had mentioned any insurance.

Mom said it didn't matter now. They'd call the bank when it opened. I went upstairs while they were still talking. The brass mirror wasn't in the desk drawer. The wax paper was gone too.

I pulled the drawer all the way out and checked behind it. Then I got down on the floor and looked under the bed. I stopped with my hand under the bed. The clip was pink and shaped like a butterfly. Josephine used to leave things everywhere.

Once she'd left a wooden spoon in the hallway because she said it was guarding the stairs. I pulled my hand back and stood up. The closet was empty except for my clothes and an old box of school papers. I moved the coats aside and checked the shelf. The mirror was gone.

I went back downstairs. There was a booster seat beside the kitchen table. It was the one Josephine used, with the cracked blue buckle and a smear of something white along one side. Two plates were set out. Mom's and Dad's.

I looked at the empty space beside the seat. "Where's Josephine?"

"Evan, there has never been a Josephine."

Like she was correcting something I'd misunderstood. Dad nodded.

"Listen, Evan. It's just the three of us."

Mom said the letter was a good thing. She said we could catch up on the payments and maybe have enough left to fix the furnace before next winter. Dad was already talking about calling the bank, getting the account number, making sure the money cleared before they spent any of it. I wasn't listening anymore.

Josephine had been six years old. She'd lost her front tooth in October and kept touching the empty space with her tongue. She was afraid of the basement because the furnace made a banging sound when it came on. She'd asked me to stay outside the door while she got laundry once, even though the basement light was on.

I went upstairs again. Her room was at the end of the hall. The door was open, and the room inside didn't look like a bedroom anymore. A sewing machine sat on a folding table near the window. There were baskets of thread on the floor and folded fabric stacked where her bed had been.

The walls were painted the same pale yellow, but the room felt smaller without the bed and the pictures. Mom came up behind me.

"What are you doing?"

I asked. "Where's her stuff?"

"What stuff?" she asked.

"Her clothes. Her toys. The bed."

"Evan, this has always been my sewing room."

"No, it hasn't."

"Honey, I used to sew in here before you were born."

The dresser was gone too, replaced by a plastic bin full of fabric scraps. Mom told me I was tired. She said I hadn't slept and the morning had been a lot. I walked past her and checked the refrigerator. Josephine's drawings were gone.

The magnets were still there. A grocery list was held under one of them. There was a calendar with the bank's number written on it. But the drawings she'd taped across the freezer had disappeared. The paper was gone, and so were the little pieces of tape.

I went into the hallway. The growth marks were still on the door frame. Dad had drawn them there every few months, starting when I was little. My marks were crowded near the top. Josephine's were lower down.

The wood had been scratched clean where the letters had been, leaving a pale strip beneath the varnish. The height marks ended with mine. There wasn't a crooked line or a date or anything else to show she had stood there. I touched the bare wood. Mom was behind me.

She kept saying there had never been a Josephine. She said it once, then again, like the second time would make it true. I didn't answer her. In my room, I pulled the storage box out of the closet. I'd kept it after clearing Grandma Claire's attic two years earlier.

Most of it was old paperwork and things nobody had wanted to throw away. I opened the lid and moved aside a stack of receipts. The handwritten card was in the desk drawer where I'd put it last night. I brought it to the bed and read it again. The mirror took something of equal weight.

The person asking couldn't choose what it kept. I'd skimmed the rest before. I hadn't wanted to understand it. What the mirror takes is held in the between. Return is possible only by going there.

The taken thing resists release. I read that part three times. Then I looked at the empty place in the drawer. The mirror had taken Josephine. The money was what it had given back.

I searched the house for another way to see it. The bathroom mirror showed the sink and the medicine cabinet. The dark television showed my own face when I turned it off. The kitchen window reflected the table and the two plates. Nothing was different.

Nothing looked like an opening. I checked the basement door last. The glass in the framed picture beside it showed the hallway behind me. No Josephine standing there with her missing tooth and her hand pulled tight around the sleeve of my hoodie. The house had removed every sign of her.

Mom was in the kitchen when I came back down. Dad had the insurance letter spread across the table and a calculator beside it.

"I'm going to look through Grandma Claire's records," I said.

Mom turned around. "What records?"

"At the farmhouse."

"The farmhouse was sold."

"I know."

"It hasn't been lived in for years, Evan."

"I know."

"Listen, there's nothing there but old papers and a building that needs work. The roof's probably worse than it was when we sold it."

"I just need to check something."

"Check what?"

I didn't tell her that the money had come from a life instead of an account. I didn't tell her Josephine was still somewhere, if the card was right, and that she was waiting for me to find a way back in.

"I'll be back before dark," I said.

Dad reached for the truck keys, but I took them from the hook first. He looked at my hand.

"Truck's got enough gas," he said.

"If you don't fool around."

"I won't."

She asked if I wanted her to come with me. I said no. She asked why. I said I wouldn't be gone long. That was all I could manage.

I found a piece of paper on the counter and wrote that I was going to Grandma Claire's farmhouse and would return before dark. I left the note for Mom beside the coffee maker. Then I put Claire's card inside my coat and closed the zipper over it. The truck was waiting in the driveway.

I walked out to it with the keys in my hand.

I put the keys in the truck and climbed in. The note for Mom was still beside the coffee maker, and Claire's card was inside my coat. I kept one hand on the wheel while I backed out of the driveway. The drive west from Corliss took forty-seven minutes. County Road Nine had narrowed under the snow, with banks pushed up on both sides and no shoulder left in places.

The truck stayed between the ruts as long as I didn't turn too fast. The fuel gauge was below half. I watched it drop a little at a time and tried not to think about getting stranded out there. I called the county number printed on the foreclosure notice when the road straightened out. It rang until someone picked up.

Then a click and a burst of static. "Hello?"

I waited, but nobody answered. I said hello again. The call dropped. I tried once more after that, but there was no signal. Claire's address was written on the back of the card in small block letters.

I kept checking it against the road signs and the mailbox numbers, even though there weren't many of either. The farmhouse sat deep off the road behind a stand of bare trees. I saw the gate before I saw the house. It was unlocked. I pulled the truck through and stopped near the end of the drive.

There were no tire tracks in the snow except mine. The house had been empty since the sale, just like Mom said. The farmhouse was dark behind its windows. I took the fire-iron from the truck before I got out. It was longer than I needed, with a hooked end and a handle wrapped in black tape.

I held it low against my leg while I walked to the back step. Claire had hidden the key beneath a loose piece of stone there. I found the stone under the snow and lifted it with the end of the iron. The key was still underneath, cold and dull in my fingers. I unlocked the kitchen door.

The house smelled like dust and old wood. The air inside was colder than outside in some places. The electrical service had been disconnected, so there were no lights and no furnace noise. My boots sounded too loud against the kitchen floor. I left the door open while I searched the first rooms.

Daylight came in behind me, gray and weak. The kitchen was empty except for cabinets, a rusted sink, and a calendar still hanging beside the pantry. I checked the pantry anyway. There were a few jars left on the shelves, all clouded with age. The parlor was at the front of the house.

Furniture sat beneath white dust sheets, and the windows were filmed with frost around the edges. I moved from one side of the room to the other, checking walls and corners. The brass mirror wasn't there. I found the hatbox under a small table near the fireplace. It was the kind of box Claire kept on her closet shelf.

The lid had gone soft with age, and a strip of faded ribbon was tied around it. I set the fire-iron against the wall and opened the box. Inside were empty picture frames. Some were wooden. Some were silver-colored metal.

One had a cracked glass pane still in it, but there was no picture behind the glass. A locket rested beneath them. I opened it. The little space inside was empty. Under the locket were paper shapes cut to look like things.

A dog. A child's shoe. A small bird. A photograph with the middle cut out. The paper had yellowed along the edges, and Claire had written dates on some of them.

I knew what they were before I found the journal. There was a folded shape cut like a baby blanket near the bottom of the box. I moved the frames aside and found the journal beneath the hatbox. It had a dark cloth cover and swollen pages. Dust covered the top, but not the edges.

Claire had handled it more recently than anything else in the room. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and opened it. The early entries were about the cancer. Claire had asked the brass mirror to take her husband's cancer away. The wording had been careful.

She wrote that she hadn't asked for more time or for him to be healed. She'd asked for the disease to be removed. The cancer disappeared. So did her infant son. She wrote about Milo in short entries at first.

He had been in the house when she asked. He was asleep in a basket near the stove. The cancer was gone by morning, but the basket was empty. Claire wrote that she searched every room. Then the yard.

Then the road. She wrote that the world changed around the missing child. People stopped asking where he was. His clothes disappeared from the drawers. A photograph lost the shape of him.

She had kept the empty frame and cut the paper shape of his blanket. I kept reading. The first few pages were hard to follow. Milo had been taken alive. The mirror didn't kill him.

It kept him somewhere else. The word between appeared a few times. Claire had found the tall mirror in the attic. She'd written that she had carried the mirror upstairs to see where the payment had gone. Instead, the standing mirror had shown the attic with something wrong behind it.

The glass had opened when she touched it. I looked toward the ceiling. The attic was above the stairwell, past the second floor. I could see the narrow door from the parlor. Its paint had cracked around the frame.

Claire had entered through the standing mirror and found Milo there. The journal didn't say how long he'd been gone. It didn't say what the place looked like. She wrote that it was cold and that every room seemed to belong to the house, but not to the same house. She wrote that Milo was still the size of a baby when she first saw him.

Then she wrote that he grew while she watched. I stopped reading for a moment. The fire-iron was leaning where I'd left it. I picked it up and held it across my knees. The metal was cold enough to hurt through my sleeve.

Claire had pulled Milo through the opening. He came back with his body. He could walk. He could eat. He could sleep.

He didn't know her. He didn't know the house. He didn't know the name Claire. She wrote that he stared at the walls and waited for them to change. When he saw his reflection, he reached for it.

The mirror gives back a shape. That line was written near the bottom of the page. I read it twice. Josephine was alive in the between. The card had said return was possible, and the journal explained what that meant.

It didn't say the person came back whole. I turned the page. The later entries were more organized. Claire had started writing rules instead of memories. Every payment remained alive in a frozen copy of the place where it was taken.

It resisted release. The person who entered could become part of that debt. Claire underlined that sentence three times. I thought about the things that had disappeared after my questions. The hamster.

The dog. The photograph. The word I couldn't remember. I hadn't known where they went. They were somewhere.

Josephine was somewhere. The brass mirror wasn't the door. Claire called it the handle of the question. It let someone ask, but it didn't lead anywhere. The standing mirror in the attic was the opening.

I read that part again with my hand flat on the page. There wasn't any way to close the door in the journal. Claire had written about entering and returning, but not about shutting the opening afterward. She hadn't written how to undo it. The final pages were scattered across several years.

Claire had stopped asking questions after Milo came back wrong. She wrote that she had bolted the standing mirror to the attic wall so she couldn't move it by accident. Then she stopped going upstairs. Her last entry was only a few lines. She wrote that she had wanted her son so badly that she had asked without understanding.

She wrote that the mirror had answered exactly as asked. At the bottom of the page she wrote: Remember what comes back is not proof of mercy. I closed the journal. For a while I stayed on the floor and listened to the house. Just the wind moving around the walls.

I put the journal inside my coat. The fire-iron would have to do. Claire had left me no way to close the door. If I found a way to bring Josephine back, I might need to break the mirror afterward. I searched the rest of the house before going upstairs.

The dining room was empty. The bedrooms had bare floors and dust marks where furniture had been. In the hall, a section of wallpaper had peeled away from the wall in one long strip. I went up the stairs. The second floor was colder than the rooms below.

Snowlight came through the windows and turned the walls blue. I checked the bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the narrow closet under the stairs. Every mirror was gone or too small to use. One had been removed from the wall, leaving four dark screw holes in the plaster. The attic door was at the end of the hall.

I opened it and looked up. The stairs were steep and narrow. Dust had settled across every step except one, where something had dragged through it recently. I put the fire-iron over my shoulder and climbed. The attic was empty.

By then it was one twenty-six in the afternoon. The sun had moved behind the clouds, but I knew the time from the truck clock. I'd been in the house for almost three hours. The roof pressed low over the room. Old boxes sat along the walls beneath sheets.

There was no heat up there. My fingers had gone numb around the iron. The standing mirror was bolted to the far wall. It was taller than me, with a dark wooden frame and cloudy glass. Metal brackets held it against the wall near the top and bottom.

The bolts were rusted but solid. I walked toward it. My reflection appeared in the glass. Pale face. Untidy hair.

Coat zipped to my throat. The fire-iron in one hand and Claire's journal inside my coat. I looked over my shoulder. The attic behind me was empty. When I faced the mirror again, a figure was crossing the reflected room.

It moved from the left side of the glass toward the stairs. I turned fast enough that the iron struck one of the beams. Nothing was there. I looked back at the mirror. The reflected attic was empty too.

I waited. The wind moved somewhere inside the roof. Snow tapped against the small window at the far end of the attic. My heart was beating hard enough that I could feel it in my throat. Then something shifted in the reflection behind me.

I didn't turn this time. The figure crossed the room again. It was tall and thin, moving slowly. I could see its pale face in the mirror, but not the eyes clearly. The shape stopped near my shoulder.

I kept looking at the glass. Josephine could only be reached by entering. She'd also written what the mirror gave back. I tightened my grip on the fire-iron. The figure in the reflection lifted one hand.

I raised my other hand and put it against the standing mirror. The glass opened around my arm instead of breaking.

The glass pulled at my arm, then let go. I stepped forward and went through the mirror. The cold hit first. It was worse than the attic had been, the kind that went through my coat and settled inside my chest. I looked down and found myself standing on a floor that looked like Claire's attic but wasn't.

The boards were pale and covered with a thin layer of frost. The boxes along the walls had no labels. The sheets over them were stiff and colorless. I turned around. The standing mirror was behind me, but the glass showed the real attic.

I could see the boxes and the low roof and the place where I'd been standing with the fire-iron. There was no opening in it. No passage. Just another room on the other side. My breath didn't fog.

That was the first thing that made me understand I wasn't in the farmhouse anymore. A doorway stood open near the back wall. Beyond it was the second floor of the house, though the stairs went in the wrong direction. Several clocks hung along the hallway. I could see their faces from where I stood.

Every one had stopped. None of them showed the same time. I heard a child crying somewhere below. It was quiet and thin. I held the fire-iron in one hand and went through the doorway.

The floorboards didn't creak under my boots. The cold stayed the same. The crying stopped whenever I stopped. I kept going. The reflected house was laid out like Claire's farmhouse, but the rooms didn't connect properly.

A hall opened into the kitchen, then into a bedroom, then back into the hall. Snow covered the floor in some places. In others, it had gathered against the walls as though it had blown in through closed windows. The crying came from upstairs. I followed it through a narrow stairwell and found another attic beneath the same low roof.

Josephine was curled beneath the window with her knees pulled against her chest. She was wearing the clothes she'd disappeared in. One of her socks was inside out. Her hair hung loose around her face. She looked nine years old.

For a second I couldn't move. I'd spent the whole morning looking at places where she should've been. Her empty room. The bare wood on the door frame. The space beside the booster seat.

Seeing her there was worse than seeing nothing. She lifted her head. Her eyes found me. She reached out without making a sound. I dropped the fire-iron and crossed the room.

The floor was so cold it burned through my jeans when I knelt beside her. "Josephine?"

She grabbed my wrist. Her fingers were cold, but not as cold as the floor. I lifted her against me. She weighed almost nothing. Her arms went around my neck and held on without squeezing.

"I've got you. Let's go home."

She didn't say anything. She pressed her face against my coat. I picked up the fire-iron and carried her back through the house. Her legs stayed wrapped around my waist. I held her under the knees with one arm and kept the iron low in the other.

The crying had stopped. That should've made things easier. It didn't. Outside the windows, snow covered the fields around the farmhouse. Small figures stood in it.

Dozens of them. They were scattered as far as I could see, all facing the house. Some were shaped like people. Some were too small for that. A dark lump near the fence had the outline of a dog.

Near the trees, something with wings stood half buried in the snow. They didn't move or leave tracks. They were the things the mirror had taken. I saw the missing photograph as a flat black rectangle leaning against a drift. I saw the shape of a child's shoe near the porch.

The figures weren't all clear enough to name, but I knew what they were. Milo stood closest to the house. He was taller than the other shapes and thinner than any person should've been. His skin looked pale even against the snow. His hair hung down around his face.

He watched me through the window without blinking. I kept walking. The standing mirror was at the end of the hall. It looked smaller from that side. The real attic showed through the cloudy glass, and I could see my own reflection carrying Josephine toward it.

Then Josephine's hand went heavy around my neck. I looked down. Her fingers had tightened against my coat, but the rest of her arm had gone slack. Her body felt heavier too. Not like a nine-year-old getting tired.

Like something was pulling down on her from underneath. I stopped in front of the glass. Josephine's reflection was a step behind us. I moved my shoulder. The reflection moved after me.

The same thing had happened when I asked the mirror for the house money. My reflection had finished the words before I had. I hadn't understood it then. I understood it now. The mirror hadn't brought Josephine back.

It had made a shape of her and sent it toward me. I put my hand against the glass. It rippled under my palm.

"No," I whispered.

Josephine didn't move. I shifted my grip and held her with both arms. The fire-iron slipped against the floor, and I caught it under one elbow. The mirror pulled harder. Josephine's body leaned toward it even though I was facing away.

Her hair lifted from her shoulder. I braced my boots against the frozen floor.

"Hold on," I said.

"Don't let go."

"Don't let go."

Her arms were still around my neck. I couldn't feel her hands anymore. Outside, the figures remained still. Milo was the only one moving. He had stepped away from the snow and was crossing the yard toward the house.

His movements were slow, but he covered ground without seeming to take a full step. He raised one hand. It was reaching toward Josephine. I pulled. The glass stretched around us.

The reflection of the real attic bent at the corners. Josephine's reflected face turned toward me a second after her head did, and her mouth opened, but no sound came out. I pulled again. The mirror held her by the back and shoulders. I could feel it through her coat.

There was no hand there. Just pressure. A grip without fingers. I put my feet harder against the floor and pulled until my arms shook.

"I've got you," I said.

"I've got you."

"I've got you."

The opening widened around Josephine. Her body came through first, then her arms, then her head. The cold weight broke loose all at once. I fell backward into the attic and dragged her after me. The truck clock had read one forty-four when I looked at it before coming inside.

I knew the time because the red numbers were still in my head. Josephine landed against my chest. She was warm. I felt her breathing against my coat. Fast and shallow, but real.

Her heart beat under my hand. I pulled her away from the mirror and laid her on the attic floor. For one second I just watched her. Then I reached for the fire-iron. The glass behind me moved.

It didn't crack. It rippled from the center outward, like something had disturbed water. The reflected attic blurred. The snow outside ran up the sides of the frame. Milo pushed through.

His head and shoulders came first. One arm followed, reaching across the frame toward Josephine. The rest of him stayed in the glass, stretched thin behind the ripples. Josephine's body jerked toward him. I grabbed her coat.

The opening pulled at her from behind. Her boots scraped across the floor. She was warm and breathing and lying in the real attic, but the mirror still had hold of her. Milo looked at me.

"Come back," he said.

His voice sounded far away. It came through the glass in pieces. I pulled Josephine against my chest and wrapped one arm around her. The fire-iron was in my other hand. The hook had caught against the floorboards.

The between had followed us. It wasn't going to let the debt go unpaid. Milo's hand reached farther through the frame. His fingers closed around empty air beside Josephine's shoulder. I swung the fire-iron.

The hooked end struck the glass just where Milo's body crossed the frame. A crack spread from the point of impact. Milo jerked backward, but the opening stayed open. The mirror kept pulling. I hit it again.

This time the glass broke around his shoulder. Pieces fell onto the attic floor and slid under the boxes. Milo's face twisted with the movement, though he didn't make a sound. His hand stayed extended toward Josephine. I raised the fire-iron.

The frame shook against the wall. The bolts pulled loose at the top. I struck the mirror again. The glass shattered around the half-through shape, and the frame split down the middle. Milo's arm vanished first.

Then his face. The remaining pieces dropped inward and broke across the frozen floor. The shattered standing mirror went dark, Milo's remaining shape disappeared, and its broken frame reflected only ordinary darkness.

The last pieces of glass slid across the floor and stopped beneath the boxes. Josephine lay beside me with her eyes closed, but she was breathing. I kept one hand on her coat while I waited for the mirror to do something else. Nothing moved. The broken frame stayed there.

The bolts had pulled loose, and one of the wooden sides hung crooked where it had split. The glass was gone except for a few dull pieces still caught in the frame. None of them showed the other attic. None of them showed Milo. I checked Josephine's arms and legs first.

Then her face and the back of her head. She had no cuts. Her hands were cold enough that I rubbed them between mine until some color came back into her fingers.

"Josephine?"

She opened her eyes. "Does anything hurt?"

She looked past me toward the broken mirror. She didn't answer. I asked again. Same result. Her eyes stayed on the frame.

I carried her downstairs. She was heavier than she had been in the between, but not by much. Her arms stayed around my neck, and her face stayed against my shoulder. I brought her into the kitchen and set her in one of the chairs while I looked for a blanket. The kitchen window was dark by then.

I could see the table and the cabinets reflected in it, along with Josephine sitting behind me. I turned toward her. Her reflection turned a second later. It was small. Less than a full second, maybe.

Enough to make me stop with the blanket in my hands. Josephine looked at me. The reflection kept facing the window. Then it turned. I checked the window again.

Josephine was still looking at me. Her reflection was too. She didn't seem to notice. I wrapped her in Claire's old coat. It was hanging on a peg beside the back door, thick wool with a torn lining and a smell like dust.

The sleeves covered Josephine's hands. She didn't complain. I locked the kitchen door and checked it twice. Then I went back upstairs for the journal and the surviving brass frame. The journal had stayed inside my coat.

The brass frame was on the attic floor beneath a layer of broken glass. It had split at one corner, but the question part of it was gone. There was no mirror left in the frame. I wrapped it in a sheet from one of the boxes and carried it downstairs. Josephine stood by the kitchen window when I came back.

She was facing the road. I took her hand and led her outside. It had been forty-seven minutes since the standing mirror broke. The daylight was already thinning, and the snow around the farmhouse had turned blue in the shadows. I put Josephine in the truck and fastened the seat belt across her coat.

She watched the rear window while I walked around to the driver's side. I put the journal and the wrapped frame on the floor between us. Then I started the truck. The road had iced over while we were inside. The tires slipped when I pulled away from the farmhouse, and I had to keep the truck under control without turning too sharply.

Josephine sat beside me with both hands in her lap. She didn't speak. I asked if she was cold. I asked if she was hurt. I asked if she knew where we were.

She didn't answer any of it. Every few minutes she turned toward the rear window. Not the side window. The rear one. She'd look at it for a while, then face forward again.

Once I checked the mirror above the dash and saw only the empty road behind us. I didn't stop. I was afraid she'd get out if I left her alone. I was afraid she'd walk back toward the farmhouse. I was afraid that if I looked away for too long, she would become something else.

The truck crawled along County Road Nine. Snow had started again, light at first, then heavier as the road went dark. The heater blew warm air against my hands. The fuel gauge stayed just below half. At one point I said, "We're going home."

Josephine just kept looking through the rear window. I didn't say it again. The house came into view a little after four. The porch light was on, and Mom was standing behind the front window. Dad was beside her.

He must've seen the truck turn into the drive, because he opened the front door before I had the engine shut off. I checked the clock on the dash. Four oh two. I got out and opened Josephine's door. She didn't move until I reached in for her.

Then she put her arms around my neck and let me carry her up the steps. Mom came toward us.

"Josephine."

Mom said it like she'd been saying the name all afternoon. Josephine looked at her. Mom put both hands over her mouth, then pulled them down and reached for her. I handed Josephine over. Mom held her close and started crying before she got through the doorway.

"She's here," she said.

"She's really here. Josephine, come to me."

"She's really here. Josephine, come to me."

Dad stood back to let them pass. He rubbed his jaw and looked at me.

"Listen," he said.

"What happened?"

"What happened?"

I looked at the journal under my coat. The broken frame was still in the truck.

"I found her," I said.

He waited for more. I didn't have more that I could tell him. Mom carried Josephine into the living room and sat down with her on the couch. Josephine stayed against her chest, staring at the front window. Mom kept touching her hair and checking her face as though she expected to find another injury.

Dad closed the door. "Where was she?"

"At the farmhouse."

"She was in the farmhouse?"

"Yeah."

"For how long?"

I didn't answer. Mom didn't ask. She was too busy holding Josephine. Dad rubbed his jaw again, then looked at the clock over the doorway.

"Listen, we can talk about this after you get back from—" "I'm back."

The house looked different with Josephine in it. Her drawings were on the refrigerator again. The one with the purple house and the yellow sun was held beneath the cow magnet. Another showed four people standing in front of a tree. I could see my own crooked arms near the middle.

The hallway growth marks had come back too. Dad's old lines were there, along with mine. Josephine's name was written beside the last few marks in his blocky handwriting. The newest line was still below mine by a few inches. I touched it once as I walked past.

Mom saw me. "She came back with everything," she said.

I looked at Josephine. She had both hands closed around the front of Mom's sweater. Her eyes were fixed on the window.

"She doesn't look hurt," Dad said.

"She isn't."

"What did you do at the farmhouse?"

I took off my coat and hung it over the back of a chair. The journal was still inside it.

"I just found her."

He went to her instead. They accepted it because Josephine was there. That was enough. They didn't ask how she had survived in an empty farmhouse, or why she didn't speak, or why her hands stayed cold even after Mom wrapped them in a blanket. They had a daughter again.

The house had a daughter. I let them have that. By nine eighteen, Josephine still hadn't slept. Mom had put her in bed twice. Both times Josephine got up and walked to the front window.

She stood there in the dark with Claire's coat around her shoulders, facing County Road Nine. The road was empty. Snow moved through the porch light. I stood behind her and watched the glass. Josephine turned her head toward the road.

Her reflection waited. Then it turned. The movement was slow enough that I could've missed it if I hadn't been watching for it. Josephine didn't react. She kept looking outside.

I reached for her shoulder. She pulled away from the window.

"Come on," I said.

She didn't move. "Josephine, come on. You can't stand here all night."

Mom came out of the kitchen. "What is it?"

I took Josephine's hand and pulled her back another step. She let me, but she kept looking at the window.

"She's scared," I said.

"She needs me close tonight."

"She needs me close tonight."

Mom looked at Josephine, then at me. Her face was tired and swollen from crying.

"All right, honey."

"I'll stay with her."

"You need sleep too."

"I know."

Mom had been doing that a lot since we came home. She wanted an explanation that would fit inside the house. Something about shock. Something about being lost. Something that would let her put Josephine to bed and believe the danger had passed.

Instead she touched Josephine's hair. "She's here," Mom said.

"She's home now."

"She's home now."

Josephine looked toward the road. Mom went upstairs a little before ten. Dad stayed in the living room for another half hour, checking the locks and looking at the weather on his phone. He asked if the farmhouse had power. I told him I didn't know.

He asked if the road was getting worse. I said it was. That was easier to answer. When he finally went to bed, I took the wrapped brass frame from the truck and brought it upstairs. The house was quiet except for the furnace.

I slid the frame beneath my bed. The journal stayed in my coat pocket. I didn't want it near Josephine's room. I sat on the edge of my bed for a while, listening. Mom and Dad moved around in their room.

A door closed. Pipes clicked inside the wall. Then the house settled into the sounds it had always made before. Josephine's room was across the hall. Her door was open.

At one oh seven, I moved into the doorway and sat on the floor with my back against the frame. The hall light was off. A thin line of light came from the front room. Josephine was standing at the window. She hadn't changed position.

Claire's coat hung around her small body, and one of the sleeves covered her hand. Her face was pale in the glass. She looked older than six and younger than the shape I'd seen in the between. I didn't know what age belonged to her anymore. The window showed the road and the room behind her.

It showed me sitting in the doorway. Josephine turned toward County Road Nine. A second later, her reflection turned too. I watched it happen again. The house was saved.

Josephine was back. Her drawings were on the refrigerator, and her name was on the door. Mom believed she was home. Dad believed it because there was nothing else he could repair or measure. But the mirror had taken something.

The journal had been clear about that. The debt hadn't been undone. Josephine kept watching the road, and I stayed in her doorway. Outside, the snow had stopped. Nothing moved along County Road Nine.

In the window, her reflection turned one second after she did.