CHAPTER 375: THEN WE GIVE THEM NOTHING WORTH KEEPING (GOLDEN TICKET CHAPTER)

Isabella tilted her head, thinking. "The telescope," she said. "We never fixed it, the small one with the scratch on the lens.

He said the scratch made the stars look like they were dripping light. He liked it because it was wrong."

She looked at the window, though the curtains were closed. "He can’t see our sky from there, but he can pretend. That helps more than people admit."

Liliana closed her eyes. "I’ll oil the hinges on the trunk so it doesn’t squeak when I open it."

Seraphina lifted her head. "We’ll need to ask the dean before we send anything with a ward woven through it. Even a small one."

Lilith nodded. "I’ll speak to her again. We already made our peace with waiting. We can still make the waiting gentle."

A quiet fall that wasn’t heavy. It had space in it. It let them breathe. The lamp glowed a little warmer as the daylight outside faded. The wards hummed. The house felt like it listened and approved.

After a time, Seraphina shifted and slid onto the bed beside Lilith, back to the headboard, shoulder to shoulder.

For a while, she didn’t speak. Then, so soft it might have been meant only for the pillow,

"Sometimes I imagine walking into a room where he is and not having to plan what I will say. Just... walking in. That’s all."

Lilith tipped her head until it touched Seraphina’s. "You’ll have that room again."

Isabella pulled her knees closer. "Do you ever think about telling him the large truth early? Not the pieces we’ve been feeding him. The whole line of it."

Lilith’s eyes went to the ceiling, followed the line of a beam across the plaster, then came back.

"Every day," she said. "And every day I count how far he’s climbed and how much of the ground below him would break if he looked down too soon." She let her hand rest over Seraphina’s, where it lay on the quilt.

"He carries more than he knows. But he also carries the right kind of quiet. It holds him together when others would leak."

Liliana laughed at that, a small, bright sound. "He does not leak. He hoards." She cracked one eye open. "Feelings, tea, late-night questions he won’t ask until the room is dark."

Isabella’s gaze softened. "He asked me once what my worst fear was. Then fell asleep before I could answer." She shrugged one shoulder, a tiny movement. "I told the ceiling anyway."

Seraphina nudged Lilith with her knee. "What did you say when he asked you?"

"He never asked me that one," Lilith said. "He asked me what my favorite sound is." She looked toward the door the way people do when they hear a memory close by.

"I told him it was the sound of a key turning in a lock on a door I already knew was open. The uselessness of it.

The habit of safety. He laughed and said that was the kind of answer that makes people call you dramatic."

"Did you tell him your second favorite?" Isabella asked.

"The hiss of a kettle choosing not to judge me," Lilith said, and they couldn’t help it—they all smiled then, quick and real.

For a little while, they took turns laying down small memories in the room like flat stones in a shallow river.

Where the stones lay, the current slowed. There were times he’d fallen asleep reading and woken with a page mark on his face.

The time he’d tried to fix the squeak in the stairs by stepping only on the edges of each step for a week.

The way he breathed when he finally stopped pretending he wasn’t tired. He touched the doorframe with his fingers whenever he left, like he was telling the house to keep watch while he was gone.

The hour slid by without them feeling it pass. The lamp ticked once as its metal cooled. A ward somewhere under the floor shifted and settled, a ripple moving through the pattern like a cat turning in sleep.

Lilith broke the silence again, not because she wanted to fill it, but because she knew what needed saying and that the saying would not get easier later.

"We need to speak about speaking," she said, " about the names we will and will not put into the air."

Seraphina’s head turned, cheek to the headboard. "We won’t say them."

"We won’t," Lilith agreed. "Not theirs. Not ours for them. Not titles that taste like old blood.

We can talk in circles and signs. We can talk about habits. We do not call to anyone who learns by hearing their own name aloud."

Liliana’s hand lifted from the rug and drew a small circle on the quilt beside her. "What about to each other?"

"To each other we use the words the house knows," Lilith said. "Old nicknames. Private markers.

If we must say something heavier, we write it and burn it after the mouth that needed it has read it."

Isabella nodded once. "I will make the paper," she said. "Fine ash, easy burn, no smoke. No ash that clings."

Seraphina’s eyes were half-closed now, not from sleep, but from the kind of calm that comes when a plan settles. "And if one of them listens anyway?"

"Then we give them nothing worth keeping," Lilith said. "A riddle with no answer. A path that leads to a locked door. We know how to be boring when someone wants a show."

Liliana smiled into the quilt. "We are not boring."

"To the wrong ears," Lilith said, "we can be."

The room creaked as the night wind pressed against the window. Isabella stood, crossed to the sill, and cracked it two fingers wide.

Cooler air slipped in, stirring the curtain, carrying the faintest hint of the garden outside. The wards thickened momentarily at the change and then steadied, like a muscle flexing and relaxing.

Seraphina tilted her face toward the breeze. "When he finishes his exams, we’ll send him out to the hill with the long grass again."

She spoke it like a promise. "We’ll let him lie there and say nothing at all for hours."

Lilith’s mouth softened. "Yes."

Isabella glanced back over her shoulder. "And if we are wrong about timing? If the god moves sooner?"