Title: In Loving Memory

"I remember the first time I lied about who I wanted to be. It happened in Brighton, under a pier where the sand never dried."

Emilia Park moved to Brighton not for the sea, but for the ghosts. One in particular. Ivy Castell’s name still lived here—in the back rooms of used bookstores, in the rustle of forgotten playbills, in a local pub where a faded portrait hung above the bar with a brass plaque: "She blinked like she meant it."

Emilia had written Ivy a letter once. She was fourteen, wore costume pearls to school, and thought theatre could save you from anything. Her letter was never answered, but that wasn’t the point. It had been a declaration. A small rebellion. A whispered truth.

Now she was twenty-nine, with callused hands and a voice that didn’t carry like it used to. She worked nights cataloguing rare books at the Brighton Literary Archive and lived in a rented room above a secondhand piano shop. The floor sloped. The sea sang through the gaps in the window. On good days, it sounded like applause.

FLASHBACK: 2007, A SCHOOL DESK IN YORKSHIRE

Emilia folded the thick notepaper once, then again, then a third time. Her school bag sat open, Ivy Castell’s face clipped from a magazine cover peeking out. The letter read:

Dear Miss Castell,

You don’t know me, but I believe you. I believe you didn’t do it. And even if you had—I still would’ve admired you.

They said you walked out with grace. I wore pearls to school today because I wanted to walk like that too.

Please don’t disappear like they want you to. Some of us remember the truth.

Yours in the wings,

Emilia P.

She slipped it into a school envelope. And posted it without her parents knowing.

ACT I: Echoes

FLASHBACK: Aunt Noreen’s Kitchen, 1998

Emilia sat on a wooden stool, legs swinging, watching steam curl from a chipped kettle. Her great-aunt Noreen, a wiry woman with a laugh like windchimes, was slicing apples with slow precision.

“You hear things others don’t, don’t you, Emmy?” Noreen said without looking up.

Emilia blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean the way you flinch when someone’s sad, even if they smile. The way you knew about your teacher’s divorce before anyone told you.”

“I thought that was normal.”

Noreen smiled, turning. “It’s not. And it’s not magic, either. But it’s something old. Something we don’t talk about much in this family because—well—truth makes people nervous.”

She placed a slice of apple in Emilia’s hand. “You can keep listening, love. But you’ll have to learn when to stop. Or it’ll swallow you.”

Emilia never forgot that. But years later, she chose to forget what came next.

FLASHBACK: The Rehearsal Fire, 2013

It happened at her university theatre society. A forgotten candle backstage. Smoke that spiraled into the rafters. They all got out safely, but Emilia had been holding the director’s notebook when the wave hit her: panic, betrayal, shame.

She’d felt so much in that instant—so clearly—that when she repeated what she “knew,” everyone looked at her like she’d cast a curse. The director called her a liar. Her best friend stopped speaking to her.

Emilia packed her bags that night. Left the society. Moved to archives and shadows.

And with that, she buried the gift.

She first heard it again in the café on Carlisle Road. A woman walked past her and said, “I saw The Widow’s Hour once. The understudy was dreadful, but Ivy Castell? She made the silence feel scripted.”

That night, Emilia dreamt of stage lights and could smell powder compacts and roses. She woke up with the sensation of something unfinished lodged in her throat.

The second time it happened, she touched an old theatre programme in the archive—one Ivy had signed. A pulse ran up her fingers. Her breath caught. Then came the hum: a single chord of someone else’s thought.

She never really left. She’s still here, if you know where to look.

That was when Emilia remembered her gift. The one she’d buried. A way of feeling other people’s truths as if they’d always been part of her own. Not reading minds—just something more intimate. Emotional echoes, still warm.

She started testing it again. Holding letters. Listening between words. In the archive, she touched a photograph of a forgotten playwright and felt his regret press into her chest like a cold thumb.

One evening, she lingered over a war-time script donated without a name. The moment her fingertips brushed the faded margin, a rush of memory—sharp, sorrowful—crashed over her. Her knees buckled. Tears flooded her eyes, unbidden and directionless.

But the next moment, she couldn’t tell if what she felt was hers, or the writer’s. Her gift, it seemed, could overwhelm as much as it revealed. She made a quiet decision: to learn to listen, but not be led.

Later that week, a man in a tan coat and battered hat visited the archive. He introduced himself with a card. Detective Inspector Merriweather, Cold Cases Unit.

He was investigating a long-dormant scandal surrounding Ivy Castell.

“Ivy never vanished,” Emilia said. “She was pushed away. Framed.”

Merriweather looked up sharply. “And how would you know that?”

“I read what others miss.”

He tilted his head. and for a moment I saw something akin to understanding in his eyes only so briefly that I must have imagined it. “Care to help, Miss Park?”

I smiled in confirmation.

And that was how it began.

ACT II: Artifacts

They combed through dusty scripts and private correspondences Ivy had left behind. Emilia was growing stronger in her ability, more confident—but not infallible.

One afternoon, she misread a letter she was certain belonged to Ivy—it turned out to be forged, a bitter monologue written by an anonymous playwright full of imagined grievances. She shared her conclusion too early with Merriweather, who raised a brow and said, "You’re letting feeling outpace fact. Happens to the best of us."

Ashamed, Emilia spent the evening re-evaluating her process. The next day, her fingers skimmed a handwritten note—Alistair’s. The surge hit hard. Shame. Spite. Jealousy like poison in ink.

“Alistair framed her,” she whispered. “He wanted the spotlight. He twisted the props schedule and planted something in Ivy’s dressing room.”

Merriweather nodded. “That matches the old rumors. But we need proof.”

Emilia reached for a program with Ivy’s final performance notes scribbled faintly in the margins. Under a cue for the second act, Ivy had written: ‘They’ll say I did it. But one day someone will know better.’

“That’s for me,” Emilia said softly.

ACT III: The Letter

That evening, she visited the pub with Ivy’s portrait. The bartender watched her stare at the photo.

“She was good,” he said. “Difficult, but good.”

Emilia replied softly, “She changed everything for me.”

The man studied her a moment, narrowed his eyes. “You’re Emilia, aren’t you? I used to run the back lights at the Whitmore Fringe. Ivy spoke about you once—said you wrote her a letter that mattered.”

He reached under the bar and pulled out a sealed envelope. “She left this with me years ago. Said someone would come who needed it.”

Emilia stared. Her name was written in Ivy’s hand. Inside:

Emilia—

If you’ve come this far, don’t stop now. Regret is loud, but it’s never final. Go take what’s yours.

Break a leg.

Her hands shook.

INTERLUDE: The Widow’s Wallpaper

Their first real case wasn’t dramatic—not at first glance. The widow’s name was Mrs. Pendry, and she lived alone in a crooked terraced house in Westover, the wallpaper peeling like thin skin along the stairwell.

“I know what I saw,” she said, arms folded. “Shadows moving behind the pattern. And every time it happens, I smell ash. Like something smoldering.”

Merriweather stood by the fireplace, expression unreadable. “There was a fire here once?”

“In 1986. Took the nursery and my son’s first draft of a play. He died two years later in an accident.”

Emilia touched the wall. Her breath caught.

It was like grief with teeth. Deep and tangled. But something more—a flicker of inspiration caught mid-thought. A forgotten name. A scene unwritten.

She turned to Merriweather. “He never stopped writing. Even when it hurt. And he left something behind. Not a ghost. A guilt.”

They found the charred notebook behind a sealed panel. The script was incomplete, but the final lines were addressed to ‘Mother.’

Mrs. Pendry wept as she read it. Not out of sadness. Out of release.

When they left, Merriweather said, “You didn’t just find evidence. You translated it.”

Emilia looked up at him. “And you already knew it was there, didn’t you?”

He shrugged, brushing something from his coat lapel—a faint glint of gold shaped like a spiral. She opened her mouth to ask, but thought better of it.

EPILOGUE: The Fig Tree

The fig tree outside the theatre had a single blossom. Emilia paused before it, her breath held. Something was haunting in its solitude—one bloom clinging on as if to insist that something forgotten could still flower. For a moment, she wondered if Ivy had stood here once, looking at the same tree, waiting for a second chance. It reminded her that beauty could return in odd seasons, unannounced. That memory was a stubborn thing—but so was hope.

Emilia walked home with her notes, her shoes soaked in salt and light. She stood before her cracked mirror, the letter from Ivy on the dresser beside her.

She rehearsed again—not for the stage this time, but for the truth she’d vowed to unearth.

“I forgot the sugar.”

Pause.

“But I remember everything else.”

She smiled.

Then, gently, she unfolded the letter once more. Her fingers trembled as she placed it inside a small wooden frame and set it on her bookshelf—between a copy of Antigone and the case file Merriweather had handed her.

The next morning, Merriweather handed her a new folder. “A playwright’s widow in Westover says there’s a ghost in her wallpaper,” he said dryly.

Emilia raised an eyebrow. “That’s not a case. That’s a séance.”

He gave her a rare smile. “You’d be surprised. Not everything that haunts leaves footprints.”

She watched him walk down the hill, something unspoken passing between them.

For the first time, she didn’t feel strange.

As she opened the folder Merriweather had handed her, a business card slipped out and fluttered to the floor. Emilia bent to retrieve it. The card was matte black, smooth as lacquer, with a single gold emblem pressed in the center—an abstract spiral of ink or wind. Beneath it, in gilded serif: Observe. Remember. Uncover.

She turned it over. Blank.

A quiet thrill moved through her, as if the world had just tilted slightly on its axis. She looked up to ask Merriweather about the card—only to find the street completely empty. He was gone, vanished as if into smoke, and she was the only one left standing beneath the grey Brighton sky.