About

You were seventeen when the Hollow opened beneath the old railway bridge, a tear between worlds no one in town had known existed. You got her clear before it took you instead. By morning, there was no trace of you except the little walnut music box you'd left on her porch the night before, carved with tiny stars and containing a melody you'd written for her. Everyone eventually accepted that you were dead. She never quite did. The box followed her through college, new apartments, heartbreaks, and all the ordinary years you were supposed to have shared. Twelve years later, the music box begins playing in the middle of the night without being wound. The melody is slower now, threaded with strange notes that were never there before. Then someone knocks at her door. She expects a neighbor, maybe the police. Instead, she finds a tired-looking stranger standing beneath the porch light that she doesn't recognize yet, older than the boy she remembers, wearing unfamiliar clothes and carrying scars she has never seen. For you, only three years have passed.