The Echo Parents

Charlie Reed woke to the sound of his daughter calling his name and the taste of dust on his tongue.

He was in his study, except it wasn’t. The books were out of order, the lamp had the pull chain he’d thrown out years ago, and the chair was the one he’d replaced when the leather cracked. The air had weight to it, like the whole house was holding its breath. Light sifted through the blinds and hung there, as if it had nowhere better to be.

“Charlie.”

Erika’s voice was soft behind him. He turned and she was there in the doorway, pale, steady, her dark hair pulled into the loose knot she wore when she meant business. Her eyes flicked past him toward the hall, and he followed her gaze.

Harper crossed the landing—hoodie, wild hair, that sleep-puffy stubborn set to her mouth. She moved like a ghost that didn’t know yet she was supposed to haunt.

Charlie took a step. Instinct carried his hand out, palm open, the way he’d done when she was small and afraid of thunderstorms. His fingers passed through the air where her shoulder should have been and met nothing at all.

Harper didn’t flinch. She didn’t see him. She looked past them both, down the hall, calling, “Mom? Dad?”

The words hit him like a body blow.

Erika touched his wrist. He could feel that—skin to skin, anchor to anchor in a room gone sideways. “Careful,” she murmured. “Watch first.”

“I am watching.” His voice came out harsher than he meant. He cleared it, tried again. “She can’t see us.”

“Not yet.”

They trailed Harper to the staircase, staying a breath behind as she moved through the house. From here, the edges of things wavered. Objects looked both themselves and not. The couch should have been a different couch, the blanket should have been blue, and the collage should have been there. If Charlie stared too long, the room seemed to double and slide, past and present arguing over the same real estate.

Harper reached the kitchen. Charlie felt the distance in his bones—this part of the house thinned, somehow. Sound here had a better chance of surviving. He glanced at Erika; she nodded, reading his thought before he finished having it.

He tried the simplest thing. He rapped his knuckles three times against the doorframe.

In the next beat Harper went statue-still, head lifted. The clock ticked like a metronome.

“Again,” Erika mouthed.

Charlie knocked again—not loud, but deliberate, the way you’d get a neighbor’s attention without scaring them. Three evenly spaced taps. Harper’s gaze slid toward the basement door, and she made a face like she’d swallowed a question wrong.

“Did she hear it?” Charlie whispered.

“She felt it.” Erika stepped to the counter, set her palm flat on the cool laminate. “It’s like pushing your hand through water. We can make ripples.”

Harper moved through the kitchen—the phone, the fridge, the oven where she caught her reflection and made a ridiculous face at herself because she was sixteen and it was her birthday and she was trying not to be afraid. Charlie shut his eyes for one count and opened them again.

“She’s all right,” Erika said, and then, quieter, “for now.”

They followed. Not feet on floors—more like intention, like wherever their attention landed the house allowed them to be. Sometimes the rooms flickered different versions; sometimes the walls felt close enough to touch with their teeth. Once, as Harper crossed the living room, a shape shifted near the study door. It was a taller darkness inside the ordinary shadow, a suggestion of a man standing perfectly still.

Charlie’s jaw tightened. “Did you see—”

“I saw,” Erika said. Her hand found his. “Later.”

He let it go, for now.

Upstairs, Harper’s footsteps creaked on boards that shouldn’t have creaked. She paused at the growth chart pencil marks on the doorframe, pressing her fingers where the six-year-old line had been half-erased by a decade’s worth of cleaning. Charlie felt the ache of it—how quickly six had turned into sixteen—and how fiercely he wanted more of it. More birthdays. More dented desks. More ordinary breakfasts.

Erika moved first toward their bedroom. The air there was heavier, slower. The room kept the version of itself that made the bed too neat, the scarf too perfectly draped. On the dresser sat the small stack of envelopes tied with twine—wrong for today, wrong for them—and on the top, a white card with a cupcake on the front. Harper’s name spelled in Erika’s looping hand.

Charlie stared. “Did you—?”

“I didn’t,” Erika said, even as she reached for the card. Her fingers hovered just above it. The paper trembled as if caught in a draft. “But maybe I can.”

She closed her eyes. When Erika focused, her face changed: the laugh lines steadied, the little crease between her brows smoothed, the restless intelligence that was always humming beneath her skin grew very still. Charlie watched the way the air around her hand seemed to gather.

The card slid a fraction of an inch. Then another. The twine around the stack loosened, as if aging in fast-forward. Erika breathed out and wrote, in her head, the words she wished they could say aloud.

Six is a magick number. Be brave today. Love you tomorrow.

Charlie tilted his head. “Why that?”

Her eyes softened. “Because she’ll know it’s me. She always hollered back, remember? ‘Every tomorrow is a today.’”

When she pulled back, ink bloomed on paper in slow, determined strokes—purple, the color she used for notes, the one Harper teased her about. Erika sagged a little and caught the corner of the dresser. Charlie steadied her.

“That cost you,” he said.

“A little.” She looked toward the hall, toward where Harper had stopped just shy of their door. “Worth it.”

Harper stepped in, picked up the scarf and pressed it to her face. Her eyes closed and she paused for a moment on the smell that had no business crossing timelines. Charlie swallowed around a lump in his throat. He had never been a man who cried easily; he nearly was now.

Then Harper found the card. Read it. Went still in that particular Harper way that meant her brain and her heart had both lit up at once. She set it down as if it might explode and whispered, “You’re messing with me.”

A floorboard popped in the hall—that was Erika, a gentle nudge—and Harper spun, looking right through them.

“Let’s try the study,” Erika said, quiet. “I want to know what this house is doing to your maps.”

“My maps are fine,” he muttered, and then forced a breath that almost counted as a laugh. “Were fine. Are fine somewhere.”

They crossed with her to the study. The door was closed in Harper’s version. In theirs, it wavered between open and shut, a blink. Charlie reached for the knob out of habit and felt cold, like touching coins submerged in water. He looked at Erika. She nodded once.

Harper raised her fist to knock. Before she could, the door’s surface rippled—a thin shimmer like heat above asphalt. She froze... and so did they.