Not in the wall.
That night, you dreamed of the house before you were born. An empty lot. A single tree. A woman in a long coat digging a trench with her bare hands. She wasn’t burying anything. She was opening something. When she turned to look at you, her face was your mother’s, then yours, then a face you would wear in twenty years—older, wearier, with vertical lines etched beside your mouth like parentheses holding a secret too heavy to speak. vertical cracks
The house fell open like a book dropped from a great height. Pages—no, walls—flapping in the sudden silence. And in the center, where the cracks all met, there was no void. No darkness. Just a small, vertical version of you, curled on the floor, knees to chest, exactly as you had been at seven years old, waiting for someone to finally see that the crack had always been there. Not in the wall
That was the story you told yourself. The safe one. A single tree
In the story you refused to tell.
The first vertical crack appeared on a Tuesday, thin as a fingernail’s edge, running from the crown molding to the baseboard of the master bedroom. You noticed it while searching for a lost earring. It wasn’t there yesterday, you were certain. But you shrugged, blamed the old house, the shifting soil, the coming winter.