Chapter 3 The museum on the Hill

Wren stayed pressed to the glass, forehead cool against the pane, and let the feeling wash through her like cold water. It made the small room taste metallic, like breathing in the lab after a long day of solvents. She could feel her pulse in her throat, a quick, nervous tattoo. The museum across the street sat dark and patient on its hill—Victorian Gothic in silhouette, turreted and resolute, with lace-like woodwork along the eaves and narrow, arched windows that looked like eyes in the dusk. Its stone foundation looked older than the town itself; snow-packed gutters still clung to the north side, tiny icicles like teeth. She traced the roofline with her eyes the way she once traced delicate feather veins with a scalpel—slow, precise, reverent.

"Okay," she said aloud, surprising herself with the smallness of the word. Her voice sounded thin in the apartment. "Okay, Wren. Breathe."

She let the word roll out again like a mantra, drawing the air into the bottom of her lungs and letting it back out in a slow hiss. The breath did not calm the tremor in her hands, though; the skin between her thumb and forefinger felt raw. Her stomach knotted in the old familiar way—tight, heavy, a coil ready to snap. She rubbed a thumb along the hummingbird tattoo on her wrist until it felt warm and almost private under her sleeve.

She glanced at the wooden box where the face-down photograph rested. The picture was a small island of paper she hadn't yet allowed to float to the surface. Her mouth shaped words she'd promised herself she would say to Jonah, and then swallowed them. Saying them now into the empty room felt like sending a letter into a storm.

"What will you say?" she asked the room, because practice mattered and because silence felt too much like surrender.

She stood in front of the window, hands braced on the sill, and rehearsed.

"Jonah," she said, testing it like a name she hadn't used in years. "Jonah, I—"

She stopped and imagined his face. The Jonah she remembered was lean and earnest, always with a pen tucked behind one ear, whether he needed it or not. He had the habit of folding his hand around a chip of wood or a page corner when he was thinking, bending problems into something he could hold. He had a laugh that came from his ribs and an impatience that was evident in the tight line of his jaw. When he looked at artifacts, his brows lifted like he was asking a question, and the artifact was required to answer. At sixteen, he had that gawky, hopeful way about him that made everything feel possible.

She let herself fall back into that memory—the first time he had shown her the museum, when she was sixteen and the building had looked larger than the sky.

"You have to see this," Jonah had said then, voice all quick edges of excitement. He had been younger, hair wind-tousled, eyes bright green with a kind of joy that still sat in her chest like embers.

They had stood on the museum's little stone steps, he animated and breathless in the March air. "It’s like a chest full of other people's lives," he had told her, leaning close like he was letting her in on the best secret in the world. "You can hear whole histories if you press your ear to the glass."

She remembered how she'd laughed at the ridiculous idea of listening to a building. He'd grinned, and the sound of that grin had been the shape of a promise. "Come on," he had said, and tugged her up the stairs. "I'll show you the lab. The restoration room is the best part."

Inside, the air had a smell of cedar and old paper and something that was almost like memory. Jonah had walked her down a hallway lined with framed maps and taxidermied sparrows, pointing out details with the precision of someone who loved small things fiercely.

"Look at this one," he'd said, tapping a case where a moth rested with its wings like a faded flag. "They thought it was gone. But somebody saved specimens, Wren. People who care save. That's what matters."

She had watched him then, watched the way his fingers wanted to touch everything—gentle, careful. "You can work here," he'd said, bright with possibility. "You could learn—be the hands that remember what the heart forgot. Fix what is broken."

His idea had seemed to unfurl in her like a map she wanted to follow. At sixteen, she had believed the kind of love that comes with work and trust, not drama or sacrifice, but the quiet building of a life. Jonah's enthusiasm had been contagious; it had made her feel as if she was being guided toward a lighthouse.

The memory softened but did not blur. She could still see the way he stood under the lab light, the shadow of his jawline, the small scar above his eyebrow catching the glow. He had spoken then with a patient, convincing certainty –the kind that later hardened into the rigid order he kept, brick by brick, within the walls he built after she left. The museum had been the place he learned to transform pain into purpose, and for a long time, she admired that about him.

She tried another script—shorter, safer.

"Jonah," she practiced, voice steadier now, "I am here to work. I want to help restore the collection. I—"

Again, she stopped. Saying it like that felt weird; it hid everything and said too little. She tossed another line at the room.

"Jonah, I was wrong to leave without telling you the truth."

The words came out honest and ragged, the way a scab might crack when you brush it. She liked the way that sounded—honest. She felt the air around her sharpen.

"How will you respond when he asks why?" she asked herself. "How will you keep from dissolving when he looks at you like that—like he is walking into a museum and all the exhibits are you?"

Her hands threaded through the bag on the desk and pulled out a small, familiar object: a tin of pins she had carried for years, the lid dented at one corner. She rolled a pin between her thumb and forefinger, the small metallic tack making a soft noise. The sound anchored her.

The phone on the desk lit up with a small blue circle—Seattle, the name she had learned to keep as a space both home and exile. "Lily," the screen said. Her breath snagged. She stared at the name until the phone's brightness made her eyes ache. The call rang twice and then stopped as if it had never begun.

She didn't answer. She had rehearsed this too: the way to be present for a child at a distance without collapsing into the newness of the truth until she was ready. But the missed call hollowed her out in a way that made the apartment smell faintly of old glue and iron. She thought of a small, nine-year-old face—Jonah's eyes in miniature, hands like his, the echo of a laugh she had only heard in memories that doubled as dreams. The pull to pick up and say everything was fierce, but she didn't. She let it ring away and pressed the phone face down like a placard covering a wound.

"She'll forgive you easier than Jonah will," Mrs. Chen had said downstairs, and the line between a child's unconditional love and an adult's demand for truth was a rope Wren didn't trust her hands with yet.

The sky over the museum deepened into a purple bruise, and the narrow streetlights clicked on like watchful sentries. Wren imagined Jonah inside those walls—the director's office with its windows that face the valley, the way his shoulders bent when he read a donation letter, the ritual of his glasses on the bridge of his nose as he examined a set of ledgers. She remembered his voice steady and low as he explained the museum's purpose to a room full of donors – the way his hands shaped ideas into plans.

She practiced saying, "Jonah, I'm sorry," and then added the dangerous clause. "And I want to make things right. I want to help, and if you can't—if you can't forgive me—I'll work from the shadows. I'll do the work without asking for anything more. I just—"

Her throat tightened. She was already imagining his response, the war between his steadiness and the wounded boy he had once been. She could see his jaw, the way he would fight not to flinch. She imagined him saying, "You left me," and the world folding inward at those three words.

Her breath hitched, and she let out a small, raw laugh that had no humor in it. "Practice," she muttered. "For goodness' sake, Wren, practice."

She walked to the little desk lamp and turned it on. Under the pool of light, the tools looked less like ghosts and more like the instruments of a life she trusted. She touched the blunt end of a brush and let her fingers memorize the feel—callused pad, slight ridge from where she'd gripped it wrong once and learned not to again. It was a small, stubborn comfort.

"What if he hates me?" she whispered to the empty room.

She didn't have an answer. The lack of one made a cold line down her back.

She rehearsed a final line, one she could offer if everything else fell apart: "Jonah, I came back because I couldn't not. My mother Ruth needs me. I'm not asking for anything, I just want a chance to do the work I'm good at. Let me earn that."

The sentence felt like a bargaining chip. It felt practical. It felt small. It also felt honest.

The lamp hummed, and the kettle in Mrs. Chen's shop downstairs clinked in some small action of evening ritual. Wren listened to the town settle—footsteps, a laugh that crackled across the block, the closing of a shop door. The air held the scent of woodsmoke, the sweetness of sugar, and the faint metallic tang that always seemed to follow her, an echo of labs and long nights.

She put her hand over her phone again. A message notification glowed from an unknown number—someone asking if the museum would host a talk about the collection. It was work, a rope she could climb. She left the message unread like a promise.

She felt tired in a way that went bone-deep; the long drive, the unspooled years, the slow mounting of consequences had left her raw. The muscles around her chest tightened into a constant ache. Her hands trembled when she tried to steady them on the windowsill. The physical symptoms were small betrayals—sudden nausea like a swell in her stomach, making a shallow, breathless rhythm, her skin prickling with sweat even though the room was cool. She put a hand to her side, feeling the steady, absurd thump of her heart, and tried to imagine it as a metronome keeping time rather than a judge passing sentence.

A long minute passed. She inhaled and exhaled as if learning a new language for breathing, and then—because practice had to be precise if anything worth saving would survive—she gave herself one last line to hold on to, simple and true.

"Tomorrow," she said to the window, to the museum, to the dark silhouette that had been a lighthouse and a trial, "Tomorrow."

She let the word sit, let it stack like bricks.

She made the small, stubborn decision, the one that weighed because she had carried around so many smaller ones for a decade.

Tomorrow. She'd face him tomorrow.