The church car park was wrong in a way Skye recognised immediately: too many cars for a weekday, lined up tight like they’d been told where to go. Engines still warm. Windows fogged. A row of mud-splattered boots visible in footwells. The kind of busy that didn’t belong to God so much as committee work.

  Dad killed the engine and sat there an extra second, hands still on the wheel.

  He’d signed Christine’s clipboard with a shaking pen and then walked them out like he was escorting contraband. Since then he hadn’t looked at Skye properly—not the way he had in that office, when he’d finally said he didn’t know what to do. He’d been driving with his jaw set, eyes too bright, like if he blinked too long something would get in.

  Alice leaned forward between the seats. “There’s loads of people.”

  “I can see,” Dad said, clipped.

  Skye’s arm itched under the cotton and tape. Not pain—worse. The sort of itch that felt like a demand. She wanted to lift the edge, check the little puncture, make sure the skin hadn’t opened. Her fingers hovered and Alice caught her wrist without looking.

  “Don’t,” Alice murmured. “You’ll pull it.”

  “It’s itchy.”

  “That means it’s healing,” Alice said, like she’d decided that was how bodies worked now. “Ignore it.”

  Skye stared at the church doors. Through the stained glass she could see movement and the faint blur of people standing in a semi-circle. Voices muffled by stone and distance. Not solemn. Slightly irritated. Someone’s laugh cut through and then stopped.

  A normal meeting, Dad had said. As if normal was a shield.

  He opened his door first and stepped out into the cold air like he was walking onto a runway. He scanned the car park, the side path, the vicarage door. His shoulders were too high. His eyes didn’t settle anywhere long enough to be calm.

  He came around and opened Skye’s door himself.

  “I can get out,” she said, because the part of her that hated being treated like glass was awake and angry now.

  “I know,” he said, softer than his tone had been all day. “Just—”

  Just hurry. Just hide. Just don’t let anyone see you.

  Skye climbed out anyway and the world tilted for half a second, a small dizzy reminder that she’d fainted in a chair not long ago like an embarrassment.

  Dad’s hand hovered at her elbow without touching.

  Alice shut her own door and immediately looked toward the church entrance. “Where are we supposed to go if that lot come outside?”

  Dad started walking before either of them could finish the question. He cut them along the side of the building, keeping the church between them and the car park, like stone could be used tactically. Skye’s trainers scuffed on gravel. Her ribs pulled—still sore in a way she hadn’t said out loud, because it felt wrong to complain about pain when the bigger problem was that pain meant she was in a body that was supposed to be under the ground.

  A door on the side of the church opened.

  Skye froze.

  A man in a puffer jacket stepped out with a paper cup and a stack of folders. He was half turned away, already speaking to someone behind him.

  “—I’m telling you, it’s not in the budget, Maureen, and if we put it off again the damp will—”

  He glanced up.

  His eyes slid past Dad first—tall man, tense, familiar enough to be ignored—then landed on Skye.

  Skye felt it happen: the moment a brain registers a face and tries to file it, and the file is marked DEAD.

  The man’s mouth opened. No sound came out.

  Alice moved fast, a hand on Skye’s shoulder, pulling her back against the wall so hard her back hit cold stone. She tucked Skye behind her like she could block a miracle with a body.

  Dad stepped forward at the same time, already raising a finger to his lips.

  “Alan,” Dad said, voice steady in a way that didn’t match his eyes. “Hi. Sorry—can you—”

  The man—Alan—blinked too many times. His gaze kept trying to reach around Alice.

  “Simon,” he whispered. “I—”

  Dad didn’t let him finish. “Not here. Please.”

  A beat. The man’s throat worked.

  Behind him, someone called from inside, impatient. “Alan! Are you coming back? We need the numbers for—”

  Alan jerked like he’d been yanked by a string. He looked over his shoulder, then back at Dad, then at Skye again, like he couldn’t help it.

  Dad moved closer. Not threatening. Just absolute.

  “Go back in,” Dad said, low. “I’ll explain later.”

  Alan’s face did something odd—half disbelief, half fear, like his body didn’t know whether to pray or run. His fingers tightened around his folders until the corners bent.

  Then he nodded, once, sharp. He backed inside without another word and shut the door too carefully.

  Skye realised she was holding her breath.

  Alice didn’t let go of her shoulder right away. Her hand was shaking.

  Dad turned his head toward Skye, finally looking at her properly.

  “Sorry,” he said, and it wasn’t just for the near miss. It was for everything he couldn’t stop happening.

  Skye swallowed. “He saw—”

  “I know.” Dad’s voice hardened. “We move.”

  They rounded the building again, faster, toward the small side garden where the vicarage door sat half-hidden behind a hedge.

  Father Mallory was out there, coat unbuttoned, collar slightly askew like he’d been yanked into the day without warning. He was standing with both hands on his knees, taking deep breaths of cold air as if the meeting inside had run out of oxygen.

  When he saw Dad, he straightened instinctively—pastor face on, gentle concern ready.

  “Simon,” he began.

  Then his eyes slid to Alice.

  Then to Skye.

  He stopped so abruptly it looked like his whole body had hit a wall.

  Skye knew him.Not like family, but the way you knew a man who had been in every important room of your life: baptisms, school services, remembrance days, the funeral of someone’s gran. She remembered him kneeling down to tie a shoelace once when she was small and the lace had come undone mid-hymn. His fingers had been warm. He’d smelled like paper and mints.

  Now he looked like someone had taken the floor from under scripture.

  His mouth opened.

  He closed it.

  His eyes went glassy with shock. Then sharp with something else—fear, maybe. Wonder. A kind of holy panic.

  His hand rose slowly, not quite making a sign of the cross, not quite a wave. It hovered in the air like he didn’t know what gesture existed for this.

  “Skye?” he said, and the name came out reverent by accident.

  Skye didn’t smile. She couldn’t. The way he said it made her feel like a story.

  “It’s me,” she said, and hated how small her voice sounded against his belief.

  Father Mallory’s face crumpled—not into tears, but into the rawness that came before them. He took a step closer and stopped himself, as if touching her might shatter the world.

  He whispered something under his breath. Not a speech. A reflex. Prayer without performance.

  Dad spoke quickly, before the priest could turn and call this into the church like a bell.

  “Father—please. Not—” Dad flicked his eyes toward the doors. “Not today.”

  Mallory blinked hard, like he was trying to refocus. “I—Simon, I watched—”

  Dad’s jaw tightened. “I know.”

  He said something else then, fast and urgent, words Skye had heard pieces of already the whole day and last night: knocked out, woke by the road, went home, five years gone, the fact of being run over that hung in the air like a smell. Enough that Father Mallory’s face shifted as he listened—not learning the story, but slotting it into a world he didn’t recognise.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Simon,” Father Mallory said, breath catching, eyes flicking instinctively toward the church doors. “If this is true—if she’s here—people will see her. They should see her. This is—” He stopped himself, swallowing hard. “This is not something meant to stay hidden.”

  Alice muttered, because she couldn’t help herself, “You can’t just announce her. She’s not a new boiler.”

  Father Mallory flinched at that—then, strangely, a smile tried to appear and failed.

  “There’s a meeting,” he said hoarsely, nodding toward the church. “Parish council. The most boring thing in Suffolk. We’re arguing about whether the hall curtains should be fire-retardant and what shade of beige counts as ‘welcoming.’” His gaze snapped back to Skye. “And now this.”

  Skye felt the pull under the tape again—an urgent, crawling insistence. She locked her fingers together until the feeling dulled into background noise.

  Father Mallory took another breath. His eyes shone. He looked like a man who had preached about miracles for decades and never expected one to stand in front of him in trainers with a cotton pad taped to her arm.

  He looked, painfully, like he wanted to take her hand and walk her straight through those doors.

  “Skye,” he said softly, and the way he said it made her throat tighten. “Do you have any idea what—”

  Dad stepped in. “Jamie Waters is out.”

  The name landed like a stone.

  Father Mallory’s expression changed. Not disbelief—recognition. Something old and uneasy shifting under the shock.

  “He shouldn’t be anywhere near this place,” Mallory said quietly. “Near any of you.”

  Alice’s control snapped.

  “He shouldn’t be near her,” she said. “Dead or alive.”

  Father Mallory’s voice dropped another register. “I went to see him. After—” He didn’t say funeral. He didn’t say death. He swallowed. “I went to see him in remand. He looked at me and said it was an accident. He said it like he’d practised it. Like... like he’d been coached by his own fear.”

  Dad’s eyes flicked up, sharp. “And you believed him.”

  Father Mallory flinched. “I wanted to.” The honesty in it was ugly. He looked at Skye again, and something in him broke into horror.

  “Because the alternative was that I’d sat in a room with a young man I’d known since he was in school, and he’d done it on purpose.”

  Alice’s face flushed. “He did.”

  Father Mallory closed his eyes, briefly, like he was bracing against that sentence. When he opened them, he looked at Dad with a new kind of understanding—one that wasn’t pastoral, but human.

  “You need to keep her hidden,” he said, reluctantly, because it went against every instinct in him. “You need somewhere that isn’t your house.”

  Alice let out a breath that sounded like she’d been holding it for hours. “Thank you.”

  Father Mallory’s gaze slid toward the church doors again. Voices rose, someone’s laughter spiked, then dropped. A chair scraped.

  “You can use the vestry rooms,” he said. “They’re small. Cold. But private. And the vicarage back door doesn’t face the car park.”

  Dad nodded once, too fast, like he’d take any offer if it bought time. “We need to—” He jerked his chin toward the graveyard.

  Father Mallory stared at him. “Simon.”

  Dad’s eyes were bright again. “I have to see it. I have to—”

  Father Mallory’s mouth tightened. He looked at Skye, then at the ground, like he was calculating sin versus necessity.

  “I won’t let anyone violate a grave,” he said, voice rough. “That is not something we do lightly.”

  Alice’s mouth twitched. “What if the person in the grave consents?”

  Father Mallory blinked at her.

  Alice turned to Skye, deadpan. “Do you consent to Dad digging up your grave?”

  Skye’s stomach turned. The word grave still didn’t fit in her head properly. It felt like a costume someone was trying to force onto her.

  But she looked at Dad—at the way he was holding himself together with muscle and denial—and she nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s mine.”

  Father Mallory let out a sound that might have been a laugh if he wasn’t halfway to tears. “Right,” he said faintly. “Right. Consent. Of course.”

  He disappeared for a moment through a side door and came back with a spade that looked older than any of them. Wood handle worn smooth. Metal dull from years of honest soil.

  He held it out to Dad.

  Dad took it like it weighed a tonne.

  “I’ll come,” Father Mallory said, and there was steel under the gentleness now. “I can help. Quietly. Quickly.”

  Dad shook his head immediately. “No.”

  “Simon—”

  “No,” Dad repeated, sharper. “If anyone sees anyone, it’s me. Not you. Not—” He couldn’t say Skye. He couldn’t put her into this sentence like a person.

  He turned toward the graveyard path.

  Father Mallory reached out and caught Dad’s sleeve.

  Dad stopped, breath shallow, like he was fighting the instinct to yank away.

  “Listen to me,” Father Mallory said, low enough that only they could hear. “I know what you’re doing. I can see it. You’re trying to fly straight through grief like it’s weather. You’re trying to control the air around an impossible thing.”

  Dad’s jaw flexed.

  “You cannot keep her unseen forever,” Father Mallory continued. “And you cannot keep her safe by force alone. People will find out. They will. They will talk. They will come looking. And she deserves—” His voice shook. “She deserves her life back.”

  Dad’s eyes flashed. “Her life was taken.”

  “And now it’s been given again,” Father Mallory said, and the priest in him fought the soldier in Dad’s posture. “Don’t turn that into another cage.”

  Dad’s throat worked. He looked, for a fraction of a second, like he was going to say something honest.

  Then his face closed.

  “Keep them inside,” he said instead. “Please.”

  He walked away with the spade, fast, boots biting into gravel. The gate to the graveyard squealed slightly and he winced like the sound had stabbed him.

  Alice stared after him, chest rising and falling too hard. “He’s going to hurt himself.”

  Skye watched Dad’s back recede between gravestones and felt something tight in her chest that wasn’t just fear.

  She turned to Father Mallory, because he was still looking at her like a prayer had answered itself.

  He looked as if he wanted to kneel. He didn’t.

  Instead he spoke carefully, like he was afraid of saying the wrong thing and losing her again.

  “What was it like?” he asked.

  Skye frowned. “What?”

  “When you—” He couldn’t say it either. “When it happened.”

  Skye’s mouth went dry. She could remember being on the road. She could remember Lexi’s voice like a lash. The shove, the gravel, the sudden nothing as her head hit and the world switched off. Then waking up with her ribs screaming, alone on the verge, the sky too bright, the grass wet against her cheek. She could remember walking home, furious, wanting tea, wanting Mum to be annoyed in that normal way.

  And then: a house that wasn’t hers anymore.

  Photos moved. The air changed. Five years gone.

  “I didn’t feel anything,” she said slowly, because it was true and it felt wrong. “I got knocked out. Then I woke up by the road. My ribs hurt. I went home. And everyone was... older. And they said I’d been dead for five years. That I’d been run over.”

  Father Mallory’s face tightened. “No light. No voices. No...?”

  Skye shook her head. “Nothing.”

  Alice made a small sound. “You never said your ribs hurt.”

  Skye glanced at her. “I didn’t think it mattered.”

  Alice’s eyes flashed. “It matters if you’re hurt.”

  Skye felt the tape tug at her attention again. She pressed her thumb into her palm—hard—until the urge passed.

  Father Mallory’s gaze softened. “You always did that,” he said, almost to himself. “Decided what was relevant like you were editing the world.”

  Skye felt irritation spark—sharp and clean, a relief compared to fear. “Because people get dramatic,” she said. “About everything.”

  Father Mallory’s mouth twitched. “That’s true.”

  A shout from inside the church rose and fell—someone arguing about paint, probably. The sound was absurdly normal. It made Skye feel sick.

  Alice’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She yanked it out and read the screen.

  Her face changed fast.

  “What?” Skye asked.

  Alice’s thumb tightened on the phone like she could crush the message. “Mum tried warning the police,” she said, voice shaking with fury. “She told them Jamie Waters is out and he’s dangerous and he’s—” Her breath hitched. “They said there’s nothing they can do. They said to call if we see him.”

  Skye felt cold move under her skin.

  Alice looked up at Father Mallory like he personally ran the justice system. “Call if we see him. As if he’s going to walk up waving.”

  Father Mallory’s face went grey. He didn’t argue. He looked ashamed on behalf of a world that kept failing children.

  Alice’s eyes glistened. “It’s my fault,” she said suddenly, the words coming out too fast. “He’s my ex. He’s—he’s doing this because of me and I—”

  Skye stepped forward before her brain finished thinking. She grabbed Alice’s sleeve the way she had in Christine’s office, because anchoring was easier than talking.

  “It’s not your fault,” Skye said, fierce. “He chose to kill me.”

  Alice flinched like the word kill had slapped her.

  Skye swallowed, because her throat wanted to close. “You didn’t know he was a psychopath,” she pushed on, because it mattered that Alice heard it. “Not even me. I mean... I knew there was something off. Especially when he looked at me like... like me being there was like I’m a mistake. But I thought he just didn’t like kids.”

  Alice’s eyes filled properly now. She pulled Skye into a hug so tight it squeezed Skye’s ribs and made her hiss.

  “Ow,” Skye managed.

  Alice loosened instantly, horrified. “Sorry—sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” Skye lied, and held on anyway. Because it wasn’t fine. Because none of it was.

  Father Mallory watched them with a kind of grief that wasn’t his to own but sat on him anyway.

  “The whole town came,” he said quietly, as if offering something he hoped might help. “To your funeral.”

  Skye blinked at him. “Everyone?”

  He nodded. “Everyone. And cameras.” His jaw tightened. “The Kingsleys wanted it public. Road safety. Statements. The town... the town didn’t know where to put its sorrow, so it put it in that church.”

  Skye’s throat burned. She stared at the stained glass, suddenly unable to look at either of them. “I didn’t think I mattered that much.”

  Father Mallory’s voice went soft. “That’s the thing about shared grief,” he said. “It turns one child into everyone’s child. Not because they’re stealing you. Because they... loved you, in their small ways. The way towns do.”

  Skye’s eyes stung. She pressed her knuckles to them hard, angry at herself.

  “What about Lexi?” she asked, because her brain needed balance even when her heart didn’t.

  Father Mallory hesitated. “There was a funeral,” he said. “The day before yours. A lot of people with expensive coats. A lot of flowers that looked... arranged.”

  Skye felt something twist in her chest that wasn’t sympathy exactly, but wasn’t satisfaction either. “She didn’t come back,” she whispered.

  Alice’s hand found the back of Skye’s neck. Held her there, steady.

  “No,” Father Mallory said gently. “She didn’t.”

  The tape tugged at Skye again, insisting. She kept her hands where everyone could see them.

  Father Mallory seemed to notice. “How’s your arm?”

  “It’s fine,” Skye said, automatic.

  Alice looked down. “Don’t touch it,” she ordered. “If you pull the cotton off, it’ll bleed and then you’ll faint and I’ll have to explain that to a priest.”

  Skye glared at her through watery eyes. “I don’t faint on purpose.”

  “You faint dramatically,” Alice said, and the familiar bickering steadied something in Skye’s ribs that wasn’t just pain.

  Father Mallory cleared his throat, blinking quickly as if he’d remembered he was meant to be composed. “Come,” he said. “Before anyone else comes outside.”

  He led them through a side door that smelled like old hymnbooks and damp stone. The corridor was narrow, walls lined with noticeboards and faded posters: coffee mornings, choir rehearsals, a warning about slippery steps. The ordinary clutter made Skye’s head spin. This building held funerals and raffles and children’s Christmas plays. It had rules for tea and biscuits.

  It wasn’t built for a dead girl.

  As they reached the vestry rooms, voices from the main hall rose again—someone annoyed about the cost of a new boiler, someone insisting on a different supplier. Boring. Safe. Except it wasn’t safe, because safe meant nobody noticing.

  Father Mallory opened a small door and ushered them in.

  A room with two narrow beds. A faded sofa. A little window high in the wall that looked into the church interior through a slit of glass.

  Skye stepped toward it before she could stop herself.

  Through the gap she could see the meeting: a circle of people holding papers, frowning at spreadsheets. Someone pointed at a chart on a flip board like it mattered.

  And there—near the back—Ben, perched on a chair too big for him, swinging one foot and looking bored. His mum beside him, whispering something. Mr and Mrs Clarke at the edge of the group, Mr Clarke’s eyes slightly narrowed like he was still trying to solve an impossible thing he’d seen in a clothing shop earlier.

  Skye’s stomach dropped.

  If Ben looked up—

  She stepped back quickly, heart hammering.

  Alice saw her face and understood immediately. She moved in front of the window without thinking, blocking it with her body like she was built for that purpose.

  “We’re trapped here,” Alice said under her breath. “If anyone opens that door—”

  Father Mallory’s eyes flicked to the window, then to the door, then back to Skye. He looked pained.

  “This isn’t how it should be,” he said softly.

  Dad would say it had to be.

  Skye swallowed the sting in her throat and tried to breathe.

  Outside, somewhere beyond stone and graves, her father was digging toward proof.

  And inside, on the other side of a thin wall and a boring meeting about beige curtains, her old life was sitting in plastic chairs, unaware that the thing they mourned was standing ten feet away, trying not to be seen.

  A knock sounded suddenly—sharp, close.

  Alice went rigid.

  Father Mallory’s hand lifted, instinctively, toward the door.

  A voice from the corridor, muffled but familiar in its pitch—too young to be committee-bored, too curious to be patient.

  “Dad?” Ben called. “Mum says you’re—”

  Skye’s lungs stopped working.

  Alice’s fingers found Skye’s hand and squeezed hard, as if pain could keep her anchored.

  Father Mallory looked at Skye like he was about to lie for God.

  And the handle began to turn.