Chapter Two – “Inheritance of Silence”

Vivienne Langford | First Person POV

The morning after his funeral, I found a drawing I didn’t remember sketching.

It was on thick paper — ivory, textured, the kind I used in the institution. The lines were deliberate. Charcoal, maybe pencil. A woman standing in front of a building with no windows. The roof was caving. The trees surrounding it were skeletal, leafless, drawn too close to the structure, like they had grown from it. She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t crying. Just standing there, arms limp at her sides, staring into something no one else could see.

There was no signature.

But it was mine.

I recognized the hands. The way they were drawn — not dainty, not feminine, not expressive — just still. Heavy. Like they had touched fire.

I sat on the floor for almost an hour, trying to remember when I had done it. The sketchbook it had been tucked inside was dated three years ago. I flipped through every page. Most were blank. A few had scribbles. Abstracts. A rough outline of a house — not the Langford estate, but close. Close enough. The attic window was different.

I set the pad aside and stared at the walls for a long time. It wasn’t that I was scared. I was just tired of realizing I didn’t know myself the way I used to.

Edward had always claimed I made my best art in silence.

“Don’t explain it,” he told me once, during an exhibit interview. “Let them feel it. People ruin things when they talk too much.”

He had meant it as a compliment. I think.

I returned to the museum later that day, alone.

The security staff didn’t stop me. No one does when you walk like you belong somewhere. I took the long path, through the temporary exhibit on memory and decay, then through the archive hallway — the one lined with steel cabinets and oil portraits of collectors long dead. The motion-sensor lights flickered on, one after the other. It felt ceremonial, like entering a tomb.

The air in Room 17 was colder than the others.

They’d removed the police tape. The glass panel to the right of the entrance still bore the original dedication: The Confessional Wing. Curated by Edward Langford.

I stood at the center of the room, where the gala stage had been.

There were no signs of him now. Not a bloodstain, not a scuff mark. The floor gleamed. But I could feel him — not in the romantic sense, not like a ghost. It was more practical than that. More anatomical. Like the air still remembered what his body looked like lying on its side.

The space had been redressed. The team was preparing for the next installation — Pain in Repose. They had brought in two sculptures, both cast in iron. One was a faceless figure kneeling with its head pressed into its hands. The other looked like a man mid-fall, arms behind him, spine bent, as if gravity had betrayed him halfway through a leap. It wasn’t intentional. They’d ordered those pieces weeks before Edward died.

But standing there, I felt like someone was laughing quietly from behind the wall.

Later, I met with the board.

They asked about the press, about my wellbeing, about donors. Always in that order.

“Vivienne,” said Helen Cheung, the PR executive, voice careful, hands folded like prayer, “we’re just trying to protect your space to grieve. But the investors are asking for a quote. Maybe even an op-ed. A message from you. You were the face of this.”

I considered that. The face.

But not the voice.

I declined the op-ed.

“I’d rather not speak publicly yet,” I told them. “People tend to mishear the grieving.”

I think that unsettled her more than a meltdown would’ve.

That night, I couldn’t sleep.

I tried the guest room, the den, even the chaise in the reading alcove. I turned on the TV and watched a documentary on birds that mate for life. At some point, I got up to pour a drink and realized I was barefoot on the hardwood floor where his scotch glass had shattered last week.

There was still a tiny piece in the corner.

I sat down and held it between two fingers. Small. Clear. Razor sharp. I pressed it gently to my palm, just enough to feel a ghost of pain. Not enough to bleed. I didn’t want the wound — just the warning.

Around 3 a.m., I finally opened the envelope.

It had arrived yesterday, before the service. No return address. No stamp. Just my name, handwritten, in that same awkward capital lettering I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen.

Inside: a single photo.

Black and white.

It was me.

Younger. Eleven or twelve. Sitting cross-legged on the front step of my childhood home. Holding a sketchpad. Looking off to the side, just beyond the edge of the frame.

Behind me — fire damage. Barely visible. A window half-boarded. The roofline charred.

I dropped the photo.

Picked it up.

Flipped it over.

There was a note on the back:

How much do you really remember?

The air left my lungs slowly. Like I was being taught to breathe again.

No one had access to that image. It hadn’t been public. It hadn’t been archived. I didn’t even remember it being taken. But it was me. The red sweater I’d worn that year, the too-short haircut my mother had insisted on, the sketchpad — all real.

And suddenly, so was the fire.