I still remember the first day I saw her — this tiny girl in a faded yellow dress, standing barefoot in front of the black iron gates of Whitmore Estate. She couldn’t have been more than ten. Her hair was tied with a piece of blue ribbon, the kind that frays if washed too many times.
She stood very still, staring at the carved letters on the stone pillars…
WHITMORE.
My last name.
I was inside the mansion then — glass walls, marble floors, and a silence so clean it felt like nothing inside had ever been touched by real life. My family liked it that way. Controlled.
Cold. Perfect. I used to believe that was normal.
But that day, the girl changed something in me.
She visited every afternoon at the same hour.
She would stand at the gate, press a small flower against the metal bar, and whisper something I never managed to hear. She would stay exactly five minutes, then turn around and walk down the hill with the slow, careful steps of someone who knew every rock by heart.
The guards laughed.
The house staff whispered.
My mother called her “that delusional child.”
But the girl kept coming.
One day, I pulled the security footage. I zoomed in.
She didn’t come to stare at the mansion. She came to stare at the letters, tracing them with her eyes as if memorizing them.
Whitmore.
Whitmore.
Whitmore.
It bothered me, in a way I couldn’t explain.
So the next afternoon, I watched from my study window. The guard approached her.
He said something — probably told her to leave. She bowed her head politely, apologized, and stepped back. But before she turned away, she touched the gate softly and whispered again.
This time I read her lips.
“Hi Mom.”
The world tilted under me.
I walked out of the study and into the hallway, feeling like I had just seen a ghost.
The next day I waited at the window again. She came, holding a wrinkled envelope. She didn’t try to open it.
She simply pressed it against the gate and whispered, “I’m trying, Mom. I really am.”
The guard snatched the envelope from her and yelled. She flinched.
My breath caught in my throat.
I fired him the next morning.
On the seventh day, she didn’t come.
That absence felt heavier than her presence ever did.
On the eighth day, a storm rolled over the hill. The mansion lights flickered. And through the rain, I saw her — running toward the gate, clutching something under her shirt to protect it from the storm.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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