Lina returned to the attic the next morning,
crumbs still on her fingers from breakfast,
feet soft on the stairs.
She didn't tell her parents.
They wouldn't understand.
Adults rarely did.
The attic waited with the stillness of something that had once been alive and had decided to become patient instead.
She sat cross-legged in the center of the floor.
There was no furniture, no toys, no distractions.
But she wasn't bored.
She was listening.
There it was again—
That hum.
Faint. Familiar. Like the sound you hear right before falling asleep,
when the world forgets to be loud.
Lina tilted her head.
"Are you real?" she asked.
There was no reply.
But the attic grew warmer.
That was enough.
Later that week, she found the first door.
Not a real door—her parents never saw it.
It was in the hallway that connected her room to the back stairs,
where the wallpaper peeled like tired skin.
It was small.
Painted shut.
But it blinked at her.
Just once.
A slow, sticky blink.
And Lina whispered: "I see you."
That night, she dreamt of staircases that curved into themselves.
Of whispers that called her name backwards.
Of hands—not reaching for her—but pointing.
Toward the attic.
Toward a girl in the corner.
Thin. Pale. Watching.
Her hair like dried ink. Her eyes full of house.
Annora.
She didn't speak.
But she smiled.
Lina smiled back.
By the time the house began learning her rhythms—
when she brushed her teeth, where she hid her drawings—
she had already begun leaving notes.
Tiny scraps of paper. Folded four times.
She slipped them into vents.
Beneath loose floorboards.
Inside the hollow under her bed.
She never signed them.
Just left questions.
"Do you like stories?"
"Is this your house or mine?"
"What's your favorite dream?"
The replies came slowly.
Etched in condensation on her mirror.
Written in dust across her bookshelf.
Scratched into the fog of the attic window.
Only one word at a time.
Yes.
Both.
You.
Lina didn't tell anyone about the notes.
She knew the rule.
If you share a secret with the world,
the world makes it ordinary.
And Dorma was anything but ordinary.