It wasn’t long after the Pie Incident that a hush settled strangely over the Chapel Ruins--not the usual kind that fluttered in with dusk, but something denser, as though the ivy itself had stopped breathing.

Maudie O’Byrne was the first to notice. She was out collecting nettles for tincture and muttering to herself (as she always did when her husband forgot the kettle). But just as she stepped past the foxgloves, she froze.

Because the air smelled of coal soap and dried violets.

The way it had the last summer Elsin Grey danced her final waltz on the chapel stones--just before she vanished.

The silence, once sealed in Maeve’s pie, had been guarding that memory. Holding it, like a sleeping child, until the village could bear to wake it.

But now it was out.

Elsin’s dance--forgotten by most, and buried deep by those who remembered--began to seep into the village again. First as the smell. Then, as a melody, faint and tinny, from the Callagain sisters’ old wireless radio that hadn’t worked since the Festival of ’98. The song it played had no station, no lyrics, and stopped the moment anyone tried to write it down.

Children started skipping to its rhythm without knowing why. Orla Merrin found a scrap of ribbon tied to a stone bench with no initials and no reason. And Finn Morrigan, usually a man of hard logic and broken fenceposts, began walking the same twilight path each evening, the one that curved round the reeds like a question left unanswered.

It stirred up longing. That was the trouble.

Not grief, not joy--but that third thing, more dangerous and less nameable. The kind that made you walk back to places you’d sworn you’d outgrown. The kind that rewrote the endings of stories while no one was looking.

Now Maeve watches the reeds more carefully. She’s begun baking gingerbread in the shape of question marks. Just in case.