Malevolent Spirits (3rd person, horror story)

Summary: Sylvia has two problems. One is a ghost in her house. The other is her husband. (Tw: domestic abuse, violence)

——-.—

Morgan is not a malevolent spirit.

Her visitors treat her like one. They crawl through her rotting house with cameras clasped in sweaty hands, hissing about evil and violence. They bring out objects of prayer to ward her off. Some of them try to trick her into speaking. Into acting. They spend hours recording the whispering of the wind through the cracks in the attic or the creaking of her home sinking into a century old foundation.

Morgan watches them from the slanted chandelier in the foyer and never says a word.

Truthfully, she doesn’t hate them. They’re alive and addicted to the strange cocktail of hormones the body produces when afraid. She can’t hate what is created by nature.

Perhaps that’s why she isn’t a malevolent spirit. She knows addiction and to be alive is to be an addict. Food, water, passion, lust, greed, love, fear. A complex array of cocktails all pumped directly into your receptive brain. The bad ghosts are jealous of it. Greedy for it. And Morgan simply…isn’t.

She has her routines. She stays well out of the way of the people who come to explore her abandoned and withering house. When those who need the shelter of her walls find themselves there late at night, she makes sure that the wind doesn’t blow the doors open, that they choose the rooms with the best windows, that the pests that have started to nest in the roofline don’t wander down.

On days she has no one, she stares out the window of the master bedroom - what used to be her bedroom - into the garden. Her neighbor’s houses shrink and expand, fall apart, get torn down, and then reemerge like new, brightly colored with gleaming windows, but her garden stays the same. The weeds bloom into late spring, pops of white false morning glory all along her wrought iron fence, and wither into long, thin stalks in the winter. The squirrels she once chastised for eating her tomatoes lay down to rest and their descendents descend on the new vegetable patches in the neighborhood.

Then, one day, a man in a white van pulls up. He cracks open the back door and pulls out a long orange banner. This he strings along her fence with precision, pinning it so that it lays flat. He examines his work, nods, pulls out his phone to snap a picture, and then he’s on his way.

When Morgan goes to investigate, she finds the words UNDER DEVELOPMENT emblazoned on the banner.

Thoughtfully, she returns to her window.

—————-.

“Under development” happens a lot faster than it did in her day. There used to be inspectors and specialists, a man for every facet of the job. Depending on the weather, the whole production could be waylaid if a single apprentice didn’t show up.

That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Her floors are upheaved. The oak cabinetry that she’d once been so keen on oiling is torn down. The walls are stripped and the beautiful, winding staircase is wrapped in heavy layers of plastic. They unhook and dismantle her chandelier with a surprising amount of care. Over the years she’s counted the number of crystals that have fallen or been stolen. She assumed it’d be thrown in the large garbage bin parked in her garden with the rest of her belongings that had escaped the ravages of time.

Morgan watches with interest as her former home turns into a skeleton. She didn’t have the good fortune to see it built and she wanders the bones of it late into the evenin, imagining. This beam stood before she was the lady of this house, this foundation was stamped before she was born—

And then it’s covered. Startlingly white walls rise up all around her, so quickly she dreams it happened overnight. The foyer is paved with tile - a choice she would have had quite a few things to say about in life - which is transitioned into hardwood throughout the rest of the downstairs. Carpet is installed in the master bedroom, luxuriously deep, and the bathrooms are gutted and replaced.

“Wouldn’t I like to live here,” the plumber says. He’s installing a gleaming faucet in the kitchen, versatile so that the spout can become a handheld knozzle. He nods to the dove-tailed edging on the kitchen island. “Had to cost a fortune.”

The electrician, perched on a ladder and half in the ceiling, says, “Had to cost a soul.”

Men. Always thinking of price. Still, their words set off a round of questions Morgan would have liked remained unearthed. Would she have liked to live here, once upon a dream? Would she have opened the double oak doors to her home with a different sense of pride knowing what comforts lay beyond? Would things have gone differently with a new roof and new floors that didn’t require so many hands to maintain?

Addiction. Morgan turns her mind away from such thoughts and goes to her window. The garden is bare soil now, rolls of sod stacked against a new wooden fence, but the sight still relaxes her. The earth is still the earth. Not everything can change.

The new residents of the house move in the next day.

————-.

Violence.

Morgan knows it. It’s why she laughed when those ghost hunters scuttled through her home, asking their questions to cameras and walls that would never speak. They didn’t know what violence was. The horror and the humiliation of it. If they did, they wouldn’t crow their questions with such suppressed glee. They wouldn’t investigate every dark corner of this house looking for it. They wouldn’t come here at all.

It’s been 85 years since the house last saw real violence. Morgan had been hoping to make it a century, as if the full weight of one hundred years could finally squash out what still echoed through her memories. But the new residents destroy that hope.

Morgan settles on the (new) chandelier. There are crystals from the chandelier her husband bought for her interspersed amongst carefully crafted dupes. The old ones are polished until they shine, the light playing through them in a way that Morgan only now remembers she loved. The new ones seem hollow in comparison. They glint rather than glimmer.

The new lady of the house is pacing the foyer again. Brunette hair cut short at a round and soft jawline, an attempt to introduce angles to a face that simply doesn’t have any. In Morgan’s day, women would have loved to have a face like that - like an angel - and would have taken care to frame their round cheeks with tight curls.  Everything this woman does seems designed to hide.  The curtain of straightened hair hanging on either side of her face slides to cover her expression and her clothing - well-tailored - is too loudly patterned for her simple features.

“Sylvia.”

Sylvia turns, the anxiety on her face melting into an easy smile. Morgan isn’t fooled even if the man coming down the stairs is. She can see the unease hidden expertly in the woman’s eyes.

“Robert,” Sylvia says. Her smile falters as she sees the man isn’t dressed like her — he’s in khaki shorts, a polo, a laptop bag strung over his shoulders. She straightens her cocktail dress with fluttering hands. “Is there— we were going to my parent’s…”

“Work,” Robert says. He has the same tone of self-importance Morgan used to hear around the snooker table. He’s already looking at the tiny phone all people carry around these days. “Make my excuses for me, Sylvia.”

There’s a flash of panic. “I-It’s Saturday and m-my mother is expecting us—“

“Sylvia.”

A flirtation with violence in the two syllables of her name.

Oh, he doesn’t touch her. No, he’s not quite brave enough yet. Morgan’s eyelids fall until she’s watching Robert through her eyelashes. His shoulders are pulled back, his chin up, one hand fisted at his side and the other wrapped tightly around the strap of his bag.

Can Sylvia see the violence in her new husband’s posturing? She must because she steps back, a tiny tap of her heels, before she forces herself to stop. She says, “Robert. This is important to me. This is—“

“Oh if it’s important to you,” Robert interrupts. He brushes past Sylvia, a mean twist in his shoulder that would have hurt if Sylvia had allowed him to touch her. He smirks when she skitters out of his way. “Make my excuses.”

Sylvia’s shoulders curve inwards. Strange to see a woman so young bending like that, spine a wilting flower and hands a tangled knot in front of her chest. She doesn’t watch Robert slam out of the house. She’s staring at the toes of her shoes.

“I flinched,” Sylvia says. There’s shock in her voice. She looks dazedly towards the door as if it can give her answers. “I took a step back.”

“You should leave,” Morgan says. Maybe this is the regret that keeps her here. When she was Sylvia, she stayed. “Before he hits you.”

Sylvia stares at the door. Morgan isn’t surprised. Hardly anyone can see her, much less hear her. Her powers ebb and wane with the seasons and now, at the height of spring, she feels more like a breeze than the tempest she gets to on All Hallows’ Eve.

“You can see it,” Morgan says. She drifts down from the chandelier, eyeing Sylvia. Is the woman going to cry? Or will she suppress it long enough to go see her parents without raising the alarms. “Something changed. He doesn’t act like he used to. It’s nothing you did and you can sense it. No, this isn’t something you can fix. This isn’t something you can apologize way. Not something you can make excuses for. This was what was lurking underneath all along.”

Sylvia straightens. Her hair slides back to hide the nape of her neck. Like a marionette, she turns. Looks Morgan dead in the eye. Says, “Shut up. He loves me.” And then stalks up the stairs, leaving Morgan shocked in the foyer

—————-.

Sylvia knows the house is haunted the moment Robert parks the Bentley in front of it. She feels her smile freeze on her face as she catches sight of a woman in the second story window. A thin and severe woman with tumbling brown hair and a collared shirt buttoned up to her neck. Intelligent, black eyes linger on the car for a long moment before she fades away.

“Everything is perfect,” Robert tells her. He reaches over the console to squeeze her knee once before clambering out of the car. “Checked it all myself.”

He’s being sweet, like he used to be. That’s why Sylvia smiles and follows him up the beautiful path of paving stones through the bare garden to the giant oak doors. She takes his arm when he gallantly offers it to her and laughs through the chill that pervades her bones as they step over the threshold.

He won’t believe me, Sylvia thinks. The thought shames her. She hasn’t given Robert a chance to believe her. Sylvia grew up in ancient places, swamps and moors and creaking cabins set afloat on them. Robert, on the other hand, has always grown up in places like this new house. Opulent, shining, ornate. He’s made this placein the image of his childhood. Fresh and rich. New skin over old bones.

I’ll tell him, she decides as Robert leads her up the sweeping staircase. He’s talking about the crown molding, how it’s real wood, not plaster, and doesn’t seem to notice how her eyes dart from the chandelier to the dark recesses of the “unfinished” hall on the other side of the one that leads to their bedroom.  She sees the dark hem of long skirts just as it disappears into shadow. We need honesty. Transparency. It needs to start with me.

After four months of marriage, she knows that Robert is…unlearned in that way. He needs her to take the lead, as much as he might protest against it. That’s why things have been feeling fraught lately. She’s not trying hard enough.

This house will help her change all of that.

——————-.

Only it doesn’t. The house is big. It takes a concentrated effort to find Robert within the sprawl even on days when he’s home.She finds herself longing for the cramped confines of her college dorm. She thinks of the sound of him typing, sitting on the edge of her bed, cramming for midterms, and sighs.

They’re not close anymore.

Truthfully, they haven’t been close in a long time. Before the wedding, even. Oh, he said all the right words and she did all the right things, but neither of their hearts were in it. After graduating, they both faced the big question. What’s next?

Whatever it is, I want to find out together, Sylvia said.

Might as well be marriage then, Robert said and then sighed as if it were an imposition.

Sylvia props her chin on her hand. She, in a fit of nostalgia, is wearing her college pajamas at the kitchen table. She’d thought to surprise Robert with breakfast - eggs and pancakes - but it wasn’t until she finished plating the meal that she realized he hadn’t come home last night.

The location of his phone, displayed on the screen of hers, puts him twenty minutes away at Arthur’s house. There are no texts, no calls, no carrier pigeons waiting at the window.

She is debating whether or not she’s going to be mad about this. No, not mad. Robert doesn’t handle mad from her very well. Is she even going to acknowledge it?

It’s not who she is to weigh her words and emotions like this. She used to be so passionate, but she’s learned to suppress that. She hides her desires until it’s safe. She needed the skill to handle Robert’s upper-class family, but she never imagined she’d have to use it in her own home with Robert.

It’s been six months since they were married, two since they moved in, and Sylvia sees the ghost more often than she sees her husband. Then the days she does see her husband have started to make the days she doesn’t feel like a relief.

Your fault, her mind whispers. She always catches him at a bad time. I thought you were going to try harder?

Movement draws her gaze to the window. Outside, in the garden, the ghost crosses from the exterior wall of the house to the fence. She stares out down the road with her hands clasped behind her. Her comportment tells Sylvia that she was from a distinguished family, sometime in the early 1900s. Did she live here? Did she get as lost as Sylvia in this giant house? Did she die here?

Sylvia shifts her gaze just before the ghost turns. She still hasn’t told Robert yet. She just needs things to be right before she does. They’re in a rough patch. That’s all. All they need is for Sylvia to try a little harder.

—————-.

Sylvia stares down at the tips of her shoes. The sound of the door slamming is still ringing in the foyer. She felt the impact of Robert’s exit as vibrations through her soles. She stepped back. She stepped back.

“I flinched,” she says. The words make it real. Sylvia won a ‘gator wrestling competition when she was 13 years old. She traveled halfway across the country without any of her family to make her dreams come true. She once stood in front of an ex-boyfriend’s car while he revved the engine, threatening to run her over, and she dared him to do it. She stares at the door as if concussed. “I took a step back.”

The unease that’s been building these past few weeks suffocates her. There is something darker than she expected in Robert. That little voice in her head is chanting your fault, your fault, your fault. It doesn’t account for the sick fear that’s twisting in her gut.

It’s getting worse. There’s an instinct rising in her that says things are becoming dangerous. Sylvia refuses to believe it. She won’t believe it. Her instincts are wrong. She’s just not getting things right with Robert. That’s all.

“You can see it.”

Sylvia freezes. The voice comes from above. The ghost lays across the chandelier sometimes, treating it like a hammock. Sylvia hadn’t noticed her up there, a silent spectator. She’d only had eyes for Robert.

“Something changed,” the ghost says. Her words are a mournful whisper. She sounds like she’s coming closer. “He doesn’t act like he used to. It’s nothing you did and you can sense it.”

I’m wrong, Sylvia answers silently. Her heart is beating against her ribs. Getting involved with ghosts never leads to good endings. I just need to try harder—

The ghost says, “No, this isn’t something you can fix. This isn’t something you can apologize away. Not something you can make excuses for. This was what was lurking underneath all along.”

There’s a dreadful certainty in her words. Sylvia feels her tongue glue to the roof of her mouth. What’s been underneath all along? Robert hasn’t always been like this. He hasn’t. That would mean she married a man who demanded her time and never gave her his, who came home late every night while she swept from room to empty room looking for him , who loomed when he was upset with her questions, who looked at her like she was—

“Shut up,” Sylvia is saying. She doesn’t remember turning to look at the ghost, but she is. She’s glaring into the taller woman’s eyes, her hands fisted at her sides. “He loves me.”

The ghost’s lips part, a soundless question hovering there. You can see me?

Sylvia flees.

—————.

Only there is nowhere to flee. The house that seemed so large suddenly isn’t big enough. Sylvia sees the ghost around every corner. She is the mirror when Sylvia goes to restock the guest towels. She is sitting at the kitchen table when Sylvia gets back from her run. She is hovering in the garden every time Sylvia looks out the window.

“Don’t talk to me,” Sylvia mutters under her breath. She says it like her grandmother taught her. Like a spell. “Don’t look at me.”

It half works. The ghost never speaks to Sylvia, but she watches. She is always watching.

The weight of her eyes makes Sylvia more conscious of everything else that’s going wrong. Robert laughs at the dinner Sylvia makes them for their six month anniversary, asks her if she really found meatloaf romantic? The ghost is a dark shadow in the corner, a silent witness.

Sylvia trips down the stairs on her way to greet the guests. Robert snickers and says that she’s always been a klutz, he doesn't know how she’d survive without him. He doesn’t help her up and her face burns when it’s Robert’s boss who asks the question. The ghost raises an eyebrow from her seat on the chandelier.

Robert raises his hand when Sylvia asks which friend’s house he was at this time, changes the motion, scratches the back of his neck. Sylvia pretends that he was only scratching an itch until she catches sight of the ghost hovering outside the bedroom window, her dark eyes unflinching.

“He won’t cross that line,” Sylvia says. She can see the palm of Robert’s hand in her mind’s eye. Her lips thin and she says, “He won’t.”

The ghost, sitting primly on the window seat, doesn’t say a word.

The loneliness stretches. Sylvia busies herself with her freelance work, but she doesn’t have the connections for large jobs quite yet. So the time she doesn’t work, she decorates, she reads, and she researches.

Then, one stormy night, it happens.

———.

“I don’t want to hear you say I told you so,” Sylvia says.

The ghost stands behind her, only her silhouette visible in the window between flashes of lightning.

Sylvia watches the rain slide down the panes. She cleaned these windows herself last week and here they are getting dirty again. She can’t stop shivering.

Robert’s voice still echoes in the room. Ugly and dark like she’s never heard it before. So what if Sylvia wants him home? He has a life! He has a job! She does nothing and the things she does do are done wrong.

No, Sylvia said. I can’t be the only one trying. You—

Crack!

Her cheek stings.

“He won’t want a divorce,” she says to her reflection. Something is empty in her soul. Her perspective is slipping. It was only a slap. It’s not as if he hit her. “Neither do I. We can— we can take some space. He’s overworked. I can sleep in the guest room for now—“

“Butterfly milkweed,” the ghost says. It’s the first words she’s spoken since that day in the foyer. Her voice is low and a little hoarse. “There aren’t enough plants in the garden to attract wildlife. Milkweed will help that. Of course they’re rare in New England, especially these days. Hardly anyone has a garden with soil deep enough for their taproot.”

Sylvia’s mouth is dry. “You’re telling me to take up gardening?”

“Maybe on the east side of the house,” the ghost says, vaguely gesturing. “Away from the road. The butterflies won’t like the number of cars that come flying through here.”

Sylvia’s temper flares. This woman just saw— she was witness to— And now she wants Sylvia to start planting flowers? “Maybe you should have taken up gardening rather than with another man, Morgan Wright.”

Lightning flashes and the ghost - Morgan - is illuminated. Her lips are pressed into a thin, disapproving line, but that’s the extent of her displeasure. She smoothes her brown curls and drifts back. “Good night, Sylvia.”

Morgan fades away before Sylvia can decide whether she wants to apologize or demand Morgan disappear forever.

————-.

Robert comes home the next day with flowers.

“I don’t know what came over me,” he says. He stands in the doorway of the kitchen and shifts his weight from foot to foot. The flowers are red and yellow and orange. “I never wanted to do that.”

But you did it, Sylvia thinks. She doesn’t know what she’s upset at anymore. The ghost, Robert, or herself. “Last night was…tense.”

Robert’s shoulders sag and he half-laughs. “Yes. Exactly.” He holds out the flowers. “Do you want to put these in water, or…?”

She has to go collect them from him. It feels odd to be this close to him after last night, but she hides the discomfort with a small smile. He didn’t say I’m sorry and she didn’t say I forgive you. “I’ll find a vase.”

Robert is sweet to her while she works, complimenting her arrangement as she builds it and taking note of the spider plants she set in the corners of the kitchen a month ago.

“It looks healthy,” he says. He pokes at one of the babies coming off a stem. “It’s producing.”

It’s invasive, she wants to say. All it does is produce. “Yes, I’ve discovered my green thumb recently.” A reckless thought creeps up on her. “I was thinking of starting to work in the garden. Since I’m between jobs.”

Robert nods. “I support that. It’d be good for you. Some fresh air.”

She nearly snips off the head of a flower. He makes it sound like she’s the sick one. Like it’s her fault that he— She breathes in through her nose. She’s being overly sensitive. “Yes. Fresh air.”

————.

Sylvia still doesn’t see Morgan by the time the gardening things arrive.

She doesn’t know whether she’s angry or happy about it. On the one hand, it’s easy to pretend without her spectral audience. Robert comes home from work on time and they eat dinner together, sometimes at the table and sometimes on the couch. They joke about things that happened in college and Robert tentatively brings up plans to make up the missed luncheon with Sylvia’s parents. It’s good. It’s easy. It’s exactly what Sylvia hoped for before the slap happened.

On the other…

Morgan is the only one Sylvia can talk to about this. When she tries to tell her mother about what Robert did, her mouth dries up. The words stick in her throat. A heady mix of shame and fear choke her into silence. What would Mom do if she knew what happened? Would she kill Robert? Would she yell at Sylvia for letting it happen? Would she confirm that it’s Sylvia’s fault?

But Morgan was there. Morgan saw and already knows. Morgan knows about the darkness that sometimes moves behind Robert’s eyes - she was the one who told Sylvia it was there. She won’t call Sylvia a liar if she says that, sometimes, she thinks that Robert is only pretending until she lets her guard down again.

Sylvia puts on her new sun hat and her new gardening gloves and heads out to the east side of the house.

The dirt on this side of the garden is hard-packed and inhospitable. There’s a stack of fertilizer and soil piled neatly in the shadow of the house alongside a gardening set, a shovel, and a small cart filled with seeds and saplings. Robert always buys too much when he’s feeling sweet.

“Not too late to hire the landscapers again,” Robert says.

Sylvia does her best not to flinch. She hides what she can’t suppress with a smile, turning to find Robert grinning at her from the edge of the lawn. “Not much of a green thumb if I hire others to do it for me, am I?”

“That’s right,” he says, rolling his eyes. He’s playing, but there’s a bite to his next words. “I forgot that having money means you can’t have any talent.”

There— there it is. Robert’s blue eyes look black as he stares at her, daring her to agree with him. She used to talk to him about the privileges he experienced growing up wealthy in a two parent household. She never realized how he took it to heart. Internalized it. Dwelled on it.

“I didn’t mean that,” she says. “I just - I want to do this myself.”

Robert hums. He’s trying to keep it light, but Sylvia knows him. He hummed like that when one of his fraternity brothers crashed Robert’s car. The boy apologized, Robert hummed, and the next day the boy was moving out of the dorms. “Don’t stay out in the heat too long, dear. You know how delicate you are.”

“Okay.” Sylvia watches him walk towards the driveway. It’s Saturday. Is he going golfing? To Arthur’s house? To somewhere she doesn't know? She resists the urge to track him and turns her attention to the dirt.

She’s got a lot of work ahead of her.

—————-.

Sylvia dreams while she digs. The garden will be beautiful once the milkweed is planted. She’s found pictures of the plant online. She had Robert order three different varieties. They’re supposed to bloom in orange, in pink, in white.

What will she be doing when the first bloom finally happens? Her trowel thuds into the earth. Will she be out here, digging a hole for another plant? There are small rocks in the way. She fishes them out, tosses them over her shoulder. Will she be at the range with Robert, finally allowed to see him in his natural habitat amongst his friends? Things have been…tense. Tense but better. Robert smiles all the time and jumps into action anytime she needs something. They have plans to go to the movies tomorrow.

Or maybe he’ll be screaming at her again, his wedding band flashing as he raises his hand, lightning crashing outside—

Maybe by the time the milkweed blooms, this unease will only be a bad dream, the product of an overactive imagination. She’ll remember how she loves Robert again and feel loved in return. They’ll celebrate their first year anniversary. They can go out so Robert doesn’t make fun of her meatloaf again.

Thud.

How deep is she supposed to dig? Sweat drips from underneath her sunhat. Robert called her delicate because that’s what he needs her to be. She’s not and Louisiana summers are hotter than this. The hole in front of her is expanding quickly despite the rocks and twigs catching the tip of her trowel.

What were they thinking when they married? Barely two years into their twenties, bachelor degrees, money from his parents and nothing from hers. She can’t help but feel that their relationship has always been unequal. She’s never been able to give him all the things he’s given her. He says that isn’t true, that her love is all he needs.

Or maybe he loves feeling like you owe him. He never wanted a partner. He wanted someone that would say yes because they didn’t have another option—

Clink.

A rock. She throws it out of the way blindly. No. She’s being awful again, putting words into his mouth he didn’t say. She just needs to give him another chance, that’s all. She needs to continue giving him another chance. He only hit her once - slapped her. Not even a hit. Just a slap and she’s wrestled alligators before—

Clink.

The impact of the trowel against the object in her way stings her wrist. Sylvia throws the trowel away from her with a frustrated cry. How is she supposed to plant these flowers with so many rocks in the way? If she doesn’t plant the flowers then they’ll never bloom and she won’t have a way to measure the time it takes to trust Robert again—

She claws a piece of metal out of the hard-packed ground. It’s caked in dirt, but there’s a line gouged through the earth to reveal a shining bronze. What is it? She chips at the dirt with her nails until chunks of it fall into her lap.  It’s a half sphere, one side smooth and round and the backside flat except for a small metal loop. It’s a button. A metal button.

She’s seen this button before.

Sylvia falls backwards. There are more buttons in the hole. Glittering bronze buttons that jump out at her like accusations. Some of the “rocks” Sylvia found earlier are buttons too, and they lay scattered around her. There’s fabric attached to some of them - a dark brown fabric that has been eaten away in spots and stained by dirt and worse in others.

Morgan Wright left her husband for another man—

Oh god. Oh god. She didn’t leave. She never left.

A cold hand settles on Sylvia’s shoulder.

Morgan is more solid than Sylvia has ever seen her. Her tumbling, brown curls are artfully arranged but, for the first time, Sylvia can see underneath them. There’s a pit in the side of Morgan’s head as if someone punched a hole straight under her ear.

“He will bury you,” Morgan murmurs. Her eyes are on the buttons scattered around Sylvia. “That is who he is.”

And Sylvia can feel the spectral chill of Morgan settle into her bones like certainty. She’s right. Robert - sweet Robert - is capable of this. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday. Someday.

Sylvia speaks through numb lips. “What do I do?”

“You let me help you,” Morgan says. She smiles down at Sylvia and the sun falls just behind her head like a halo. “That is what I’m here to do.”

Sylvia bows her head and weeps.