The train carried her from cracked sidewalks and corner stores into clean streets and twelve-dollar lattes, and she felt the distance like a bruise.
Beacon Hill glittered with Christmas lights, wreaths, and warm windows, and Felicia tightened her thin jacket while her stomach ached with hunger.
She stopped at number two-four-seven, a brownstone with a wreath that probably cost more than her outfit, and for a second she nearly turned around.
Something about that house felt heavy, like money couldn’t warm whatever lived inside, but her mother’s hospital bed forced her finger to the buzzer.
A warm older voice answered, inviting her in, and when the door buzzed open, Felicia stepped into a coldness deeper than temperature.
The floors gleamed, the art was expensive, the chandelier perfect, yet the air felt lifeless, as if the house had forgotten how to hold joy.
Margaret Morrison appeared upstairs with silver hair and kind eyes, introducing herself as Jake’s mother, and her handshake was warm but worried.
She walked Felicia through rooms like museums—a marble kitchen unused, a living room untouched, a fireplace that looked like it never knew flames.
Felicia noticed photos of a dark-haired woman and a laughing little girl, and Margaret quietly said, “That’s Clare, Jake’s wife, she died.”
They reached Jasmine’s room, a fairytale space with murals, toys still boxed, and a carriage bed, yet the beauty felt like a costume over grief.
In the corner sat Jasmine, small and still, clutching a stuffed elephant and staring out the window as if waiting for someone who couldn’t return.
Felicia knelt and introduced herself softly, and though Jasmine didn’t answer, her eyes flickered for one second, just long enough to be seen.
Margaret left them alone, but heavy footsteps came fast, and Jake entered in a suit, Bluetooth in his ear, looking at Felicia like furniture.
He laid out rules—two weeks, four thousand a month, keep Jasmine safe, don’t touch his office, don’t enter his bedroom—then turned away.
Felicia’s calm “Clear, Mr. Morrison” made him pause, and her quiet question—“Do you know who you are?”—hung in the air after he left.
The first week was silence so thick it felt like drowning, but Felicia still came every morning to Jasmine’s window corner and spoke gently anyway.
She talked while folding laundry, hummed her grandmother’s songs, read picture books out loud, and treated the room like a place where life returned.
Jasmine never responded, but Felicia could tell she was listening, because silence still has weight when someone is holding it with you.
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