She was home. The same table. The same laptop, closed now for the first time in longer than she could remember, the small, private ritual of ending a day that no longer felt like it deserved the word ordinary even when nothing extraordinary happened in it. But the apartment around her had changed since the last time she'd sat at this table believing herself to be nothing more than a slightly overworked researcher with an unusual hobby.
The immaculate order was gone. Books stacked in uneven towers that would have offended her, once, on principle alone. Notes covered every surface — the counter, the kitchen table, the arm of the couch — pages of her own increasingly frantic handwriting spreading outward the way the sigil in Pluckley's square had once spread across a fog-choked evening, human bodies standing in for the same restless, connective hunger her own notes now betrayed. Diagrams covered the walls, string and pushpins linking one page to another in a pattern that would have looked, to anyone else walking into this apartment, like the private obsession of someone who had lost the thread of her own sanity somewhere along the way.
Maybe she had. She no longer trusted herself to be the one who could tell.
She sat at the table and opened her laptop. The cursor blinked in an empty document, patient, waiting, the same unhurried patience she'd come to recognize in nearly everything that had touched her life these past weeks.
No email. No notification. Just the blank page, and her own reflection faint in the black margin around the cursor, and the particular silence of an apartment that had once felt, before all this, like the safest room she owned.
She typed a title, block letters, the same instinct that had driven her to write THRESHOLD across a page in the Vatican's oldest archive: WHAT IT WANTS.
She stared at it a long moment.
Then began to type beneath it — fast, then slower, then fast again, whole paragraphs of something she would not, if asked, have been able to summarize in a single sentence, though she understood, dimly, that she was trying to build the beginning of an answer to a question that had haunted every room she'd stood in since a village called Pluckley had first pulled her out of an ordinary life and into whatever this had become instead.
Her phone buzzed.
She glanced at it. MAYA: you home yet? mama wants to know if you're okay
Abigail looked at the message a long beat, feeling something in her chest loosen, just slightly, at the plain, ordinary shape of the question — the kind of question that belonged to a life she was no longer entirely certain she still had full access to, and was grateful, all the same, to be asked.
She typed back: I'm home. Tell her yes.
She set the phone down. Returned to the document.
A beat.
She picked the phone back up. Typed a second message.
Also tell her I'd appreciate the prayer.
She set it down again, and this time let herself sit with the small, private warmth of having said it and meant it, before turning back to the keys and the blank page still waiting to be filled.
The apartment held its quiet around her — traffic outside, distant and ordinary, the whole indifferent city going about its own unremarkable night. Inside, only the sound of her own typing, steady, determined, the small mechanical rhythm of someone building something out of everything she'd learned rather than surrendering to the size of what she still didn't understand.
And very faintly, barely audible beneath the traffic and her own typing and the ordinary hum of the refrigerator in the next room —
The hum.
She kept typing anyway. Her breathing stayed steady in the dark, deliberate, the breathing of someone who had decided, somewhere over these past several weeks, that fear was no longer a luxury she could afford to let slow her down.
She didn't stop.
Her phone buzzed again. Not a text this time. A call.
Restricted Number.
She stared at it a moment — the same small, cold hesitation she'd felt weeks ago, a lifetime ago, in this same apartment, before a different call had first pulled the whole shape of her life sideways. She answered it anyway.
"Hello?"
"Dr. White." Bishop Graves' voice, quiet, unmistakable even reduced to a thin overseas connection. "We need you back." A beat. "We found something."
Abigail went very still. She did not ask what.
She already knew, with the same cold, settling certainty that had carried her through every impossible room this past month had shown her, that she was going to say yes.
"Send me everything," she said, quietly.
She ended the call. Set the phone down. Looked back at the laptop screen, at the document still open, at the cursor blinking patiently beneath everything she'd already written and everything she still didn't yet know how to write.
In the dark reflection of the screen, just for a single frame, just long enough to register before it was gone —
Sister Lydia. Standing behind her.
Black eyes. That same familiar, patient smile.
Gone.
Abigail did not turn around. She sat very still, the hum settling faintly into the edges of her apartment the way it had settled into every room this story had asked her to stand in, and understood, with a clarity that felt less like fear now than like simple, unavoidable fact, that whatever waited for her next would not be the end of this.
It would only be the next threshold.
And she was already standing at the door.