The Things A Ghost Remembers

She unlatched the chain.

The sound was small, but it echoed like a confession. Anton Moreau stood in the hallway, his face half-lit by the bare bulb above her door. The scar on his left hand caught the light — a pale crescent, old and deep. Marc had burned his palm on a stolen bottle of wine the night he proposed. She'd kissed that scar a thousand times.

"You know my husband," Élise said, not stepping aside.

"Your candle tells me you loved him." He tilted his head. "May I come in?"

She should have closed the door. Instead, she stepped back.

He moved through her apartment like a man walking through a familiar dream. He stopped at the window seat where she kept her lace restorations. Antique lace was her craft — fragile, merciless, unforgiving. His fingers hovered over a chanterelle collar she'd been mending for three weeks.

"Point de Paris," he murmured. "The threads run diagonally. Most restorers use point de gaze, but you know better. The original maker would have used what she had."

Élise felt the ground tilt. "How do you know that?"

He looked at her, and for one dizzying second, it was Marc's eyes catching the lamplight. "I catalogued an auction of seventeenth-century lace in Lyon, years ago. You learn to read the stitches."

The answer was smooth. Too smooth. But behind it, something flickered — a warning, or a dare.

"You don't look like a man who works in an auction house," she said.

"I don't look like a man who lives in an apartment," he replied, "but here I am."

He reached for her hand, turning her palm upward. His thumb traced the callus she'd earned from fourteen hours of needlework. Marc used to do that — trace her palm with a lover's careless attention.

"You have the hands of a woman who doesn't sleep," he said.

She pulled away. "What do you want from me?"

"Oh, Élise." He said her first name like he'd been saving it. "I only came to ask why the candle went out."

He left before she could answer. From the window, she watched him cross the street. At his own window, he paused, staring back.

She lit the candle at midnight, telling herself it was habit.

But when his lights went off, she kept the flame burning — and hated that she wondered if he could see it.