Novels by Orezi

The old woman lived two houses down the lake road, in a small weathered cottage with a garden that had grown wild around the edges. I had watched her for years from the upstairs windows, a quiet figure who walked the shoreline every morning with a cane and a wide-brimmed hat. She never came close to my house. She always stopped at the edge of the property line and turned back, as if some invisible boundary kept her away. On the day she finally crossed that line, the air inside the walls felt different, heavier, like the house itself was listening.Sophie was playing in the front yard that afternoon, collecting smooth stones from the gravel path and lining them up in careful rows. Claire sat on the porch steps with a book she was not reading, her eyes following her daughter while her mind stayed somewhere else. Ryan was still at work. The lake lay quiet under a thin layer of afternoon haze. I hovered just inside the open front door, close enough to feel the warm air mixing with the col

Sophie set the tea party with the same careful seriousness she brought to everything she loved. I watched from the corner of her room as she arranged four tiny plastic cups on the low table she had pulled into the middle of the floor. She placed a saucer under each one, then set out a plate of imaginary cookies made from crumpled paper. Her dolls sat in a neat circle: the bear with the missing eye, the doll with the yellow dress, and an empty space she always left for me.“Diane, sit here,” she said, patting the floor beside the yellow-dress doll. “You’re the guest of honor today.”I lowered myself into the space she had made for me. The air around the table grew colder, the way it always did when I stayed close. Sophie smiled and poured invisible tea into my cup first.“It’s not too hot,” she told me. “I made it just the way you like it. Vanilla and a little bit of honey.”She knew the scent that clung to me. She had never been told about the vanilla candles I once burned, yet someho

Claire noticed things feel off almost immediately, but she said nothing yet. I watched her closely as the days passed, her sharp, intuitive eyes scanning every room with growing uncertainty. She would pause in the middle of unpacking a box, her hands stilling on a stack of books, and look around as if she felt someone standing right behind her. I made sure she did. I let my cold presence brush against her back when she was alone in the kitchen. She shivered and rubbed her arms, but she didn’t call out to Ryan. She just stood there for a long moment, breathing slowly, trying to convince herself it was nothing.Sophie was the center of my world now. The little girl reminded me so much of Lily that I couldn’t stay away. I followed her everywhere, letting my presence grow stronger around her. She saw me clearly. She talked to me when her parents weren’t looking. She drew pictures of us together and left them under her pillow. She told me secrets and laughed at my cold touch.“Diane, you’r

Sophie reminded me so much of Lily that I couldn’t stay away. Every time the little girl laughed or ran through the hallway with her curly hair bouncing, it felt like a knife twisting in the emptiness inside me. Lily would be old now, probably gone, but Sophie was here. Alive. Seeing me. Talking to me. Choosing me. I began testing small disturbances around the house, not to scare them away, but to stay close to her. To make them feel me. To make Sophie’s parents understand that I was real.It started with cold spots. I would hover near Sophie when she played alone in her room, letting my presence drop the temperature around her. She would shiver and giggle.“You’re cold again, Diane,” she said one afternoon, wrapping her arms around herself. “But I like it. It feels like you’re hugging me.”I let the cold spread a little further, touching the air near her dolls. The plastic figures seemed to shiver. Sophie clapped her hands in delight.Claire walked past the doorway and paused. She ru

Sophie’s words changed everything on a quiet afternoon when the sun was streaming through the windows and the house felt almost peaceful. I had been following her all day, drawn to her like a moth to the only flame left in my cold existence. She was playing in the hallway with her dolls, setting up a little picnic on the floor. Her curly hair bounced as she arranged the tiny plastic plates.“The lady likes tea too,” she said out loud, pouring imaginary tea into an extra cup. “She’s sad but she’s nice. She lives here.”Claire was in the living room unpacking boxes. She paused, a book in her hand, and looked toward the hallway.“Sophie? Who are you talking to, sweetheart?”Sophie looked up with that bright, innocent smile. “The lady in the hall. Her name is Diane. She says this was her house before.”Claire’s face went pale. The book slipped from her hands and hit the floor with a soft thud. She walked slowly into the hallway, her eyes darting around as if trying to see what Sophie saw.

The days after their first night settled into a kind of rhythm that I watched with growing intensity. Ryan left early each morning for his new job as an architect, kissing Claire goodbye and ruffling Sophie’s hair before driving off. Claire worked from home part time, unpacking boxes and arranging their new life while trying to maintain some sense of normalcy for their daughter. Sophie spent her days exploring the house, playing in the yard by the lake, and talking to me when her parents weren’t paying attention.I stayed close to Sophie constantly. She had become my anchor in this long emptiness. The way she looked at me with those bright, trusting eyes reminded me so much of Lily that it hurt in the best and worst ways. She would set up tea parties in her room and pour imaginary tea for me. She drew pictures of us together and hid them under her pillow. She told me secrets about her fears of the dark and how she missed her old friends. I listened to every word, pouring what comfort

The calm didn’t last.It caught up with Ava that evening, hours after the kitchen conversation, while she was alone reheating leftovers and replaying his words on a loop. I almost didn’t pull back either. The line kept sharpening instead of softening, and by the time Damon walked in from a late meeting, something in her had gone from shaken to furious in a way the morning’s careful honesty hadn’t fully accounted for.“You let me apologize to you this morning like I was the only one who’d almost done something,” she said, before he’d even set his bag down. “You let me sit there feeling ashamed while you nodded along being understanding, and the whole time you were sitting on your own version of the exact same thing for three weeks.”“I told you. This morning. The second you told me yours.”“You told me after I went first.” Her voice rose, sharper than she’d let it go in months. “That’s not the same as honesty, Damon. That’s matching. You waited to see how much I’d admit before deciding

Ava told him the next morning, before either of them had left for work, because she’d learned the hard way what happened to things left to sit even one day longer than necessary.“Something happened last night,” she said, standing in the kitchen with her coffee untouched in front of her. “Nothing happened, exactly, but something almost did, and I need to tell you before it turns into one more secret I let calcify.”Damon set down his own mug slowly, and she watched him brace, the particular stillness he got when preparing for something he already suspected was going to hurt.“Nathaniel walked me home after the Halden dinner last night,” she said. “At my door, there was a moment. He almost kissed me. I almost let him. I stopped it before anything happened, but I stood there for a second not stopping it, and that second scared me more than almost anything that’s happened to us in the last year, because it wasn’t dramatic or forced or dangerous. It was just easy. He’s easy, Damon. No his

The client dinner ran long, three hours of careful diplomacy over expensive steak while Halden Group’s leadership slowly talked themselves back into trusting the agency they’d nearly walked away from. By the time it wrapped, the city had gone dark and quiet in the particular way it did after ten on a weeknight, and Ava was loose limbed with the specific exhaustion of relief after sustained effort, two glasses of wine warming her further than she’d intended.“I’ll walk you,” Nathaniel said, already falling into step beside her when she turned toward home instead of hailing a cab. “It’s a nice night. And I could use the air after listening to myself talk about quarterly projections for three straight hours.”“You were good in there,” she said. “Better than good. I think we actually saved it tonight.”“We saved it. Both of us.” He glanced over at her, something warm in it. “You handled the moment when Whitfield brought up the scandal again better than I could have. Calm, no defensiveness

Nathaniel found her at her desk at half past seven, the office mostly emptied out around them, a single lamp throwing warm light over a spreadsheet she’d been staring at without actually reading for the better part of twenty minutes.“You’ve had that same tab open since I got back from getting coffee,” he said, setting a second cup down beside her keyboard without being asked. “That was forty minutes ago.”“I’m aware.” She rubbed her eyes. “I keep starting the same paragraph and forgetting it by the time I reach the end of it.”“That’s not a productivity problem. That’s an exhaustion problem.” He pulled the spare chair over from the next desk and sat down across from her, not with any urgency, just settling in the way someone does when they intend to actually stay a while. “When did you last take a full day off. An actual day. Not a Sunday spent answering emails in bed.”Ava had to think about it longer than felt comfortable. “I don’t remember.”“That’s what I thought.” He nudged the

It was a dry cleaning ticket, of all things, that finally cracked her.Ava had asked Damon three times over two days to grab her navy blazer from the cleaners on his way home, since it sat directly between his office and the building and she’d been slammed since seven that morning with a client call that ran long, a follow up with Emma trying to smooth the latest rupture with Julian, and a strategy session about the Ferro Whitcombe fallout that had somehow spawned two more meetings by lunch.He walked in at nine without it, already mid apology.“I forgot. I got pulled into a call with legal about the audit release and it ran until eight, I’m sorry, I’ll grab it tomorrow.”“It’s fine,” Ava said, in the tone of someone for whom it was very much not fine, though the blazer itself had nothing to do with it.“You sound upset.”“I’m not upset about the blazer, Damon.” She heard her own voice come out sharper than she meant it to, the words arriving before she’d fully decided to let them. “I

Emma showed up at Damon’s penthouse without calling first, which he understood the moment he opened the door and saw her face. She’d done the same thing once before, months ago, the night everything about Ava and the birthday party finally broke open. He recognized the particular set of her jaw.“Three years,” she said, before he’d even fully stepped back to let her in. “You knew for three years and you let me stand at a family meeting eighteen months ago and act shocked right alongside everyone else when this all came out. Was that for my benefit too? Was I performing a reaction to news you already knew wasn’t news?”“Emma.” He kept his voice level, though something in his chest had gone tight. “I heard a rumor. One conversation, years ago, with an old employee who mentioned Father had another child somewhere. I never had proof. I never even had a name until much later.”“You didn’t tell me there was a rumor.”“No.”“Why.”He exhaled, and for once didn’t reach for the smooth, managed