In a villa within the community, a woman was busy with her work.
Dark circles were clearly visible under her eyes.
Her hair was limp and disheveled, evidently having gone some time without proper care.
Yet even so, she continued to use a small knife in her hand to refine the details of a model.
The “scratch-scratch” sound, accompanied by somewhat ragged breathing, rose and fell in the room.
Her name was Linda Wolfe, a handcraft artist specializing in miniature models.
Her personal art exhibition was about to open.
However, due to a series of recent trivial matters and her poor personal state,
she had not been completing the works scheduled for the exhibition step by step as planned.
The originally ample time had been completely eroded, and with the date drawing ever closer, Linda grew increasingly anxious.
Her gaze gradually grew unfocused, and she couldn’t help but recall the events at the recent funeral.
Her mother, Ellen, had passed away, but honestly, she wasn’t saddened by it.
That woman, though nominally Linda’s mother, had brought her all sorts of misfortune.
All of this was because of a certain cult that her mother Ellen followed.
After that, Linda began to distance herself from her mother, and until the other’s death, she had minimal contact with her.
Yet, the shadow did not dissipate with Ellen’s death; instead, it lingered persistently in Linda’s mind.
In the room, the breathing grew increasingly ragged, the pace of the small knife became faster and faster, and then stopped abruptly.
The bead of blood seeping from her finger and the faint pain brought Linda back to a sliver of reason.
She put down the model in her hand, pulled a tissue from nearby to wipe her hand, and then walked towards her daughter’s room.
“Feeling a little better now, my dear?”
After Ellen’s death, the one most heartbroken in the family was Linda’s daughter, Charles.
The daughter was quiet and reserved but possessed remarkable artistic talent.
Apart from her grandmother who raised her, she wasn’t very close to anyone else.
Since Grandma Ellen’s death, Charles’s sleep had become very poor.
This forced Linda to squeeze time out of her busy schedule to coax her to sleep.
“She’s really not coming back, is she?”
Just as Linda was pondering how to answer her daughter’s question, she heard Charles speak again.
“Grandma is gone, so who will take care of me now?”
“Mommy will take care of you, Daddy and your brother will too. Rest easy, sweetie.”
Linda gently kissed her daughter on the forehead but then noticed a strange word carved on Charles’s headboard at some unknown time.
Her heart sank. After rising, she didn’t return to her work or rest. Instead, she went to the room her mother had lived in.
From a box containing her mother’s belongings, she pulled out a book titled Notes on Summoning Spirits.
Opening the book, a card caught her eye.
“My dear Linda, please forgive me for not being able to tell you everything. Please do not resent me, do not despair over what you have lost.
You will eventually see it was all worth it. Our sacrifices are insignificant compared to the rewards.”
The signature read, “Your loving mother.”
Linda couldn’t comprehend these cryptic words, but this mystical, rambling style triggered painful memories.
She quickly closed the book, stuffed it back into the box, and then pressed down heavily on the cardboard box as if burying some ominous object, before hurriedly turning off the light and preparing to leave.
But just as Linda stepped over the threshold, the corner of her eye caught a figure standing in the dark corner of the room.
A familiar old woman had appeared in the gloom at some unknown moment and was facing Linda, wearing a horrifying smile.
Linda switched the light back on, only to find the corner empty.
What had just happened left her looking alarmed, and she kept glancing around the room.
It was then that her gaze fell upon the model displayed on the table.
It depicted a scene from shortly after Charles’s birth, where Ellen had insisted on breastfeeding her granddaughter. Linda had later recreated it through a model.
Now, the more she looked at it, the more it filled Linda with fear.
She walked quickly over, turned the model around so its back faced her, then turned off the light and left the room.
Returning to her own room, her husband Steve was in bed reading a book.
He hadn’t noticed the band-aid on his wife’s finger.
“Could Charlie still not sleep?”
Steve was a medical expert in psychiatry, gentle and refined in character, a typical intellectual.
“She’s doing much better than a month ago, but she still misses her grandma terribly.”
“Even though her grandma clearly favored boys over girls…”
Getting into bed and pulling up the covers, Linda said this.
“We are far from understanding Ellen the way Charlie does. We can’t grasp the bond between grandmother and granddaughter.”
Steve picked up his book again.
“There have been a lot of new faces in the community lately. This morning when I went out to take out the garbage, the old gentleman opposite had also gone back to his hometown to visit family.”
“People from the Los Angeles Police Department seemed to have come by to ask questions in the evening too.”
This wasn’t a big deal.
The community was near Hollywood, with high personnel mobility, which was normal.
“What happens in the community has nothing to do with our family. Right now, I just want to lock up that room.”
Linda looked uneasy but did not confide in her husband.
Due to her childhood experiences, she suffered from a severe mental illness.
Each time, she needed Steve’s help to cope.
Whether worried about adding to Steve’s stress or afraid of his possible strange looks,
Linda did not mention the apparition of her mother she had seen earlier.
“Relax, dear. The belongings have been sorted. You can lock it up anytime you want.”
Steve’s tone was gentle, but he clearly didn’t understand Linda.
He believed that contact with things related to her mother had agitated his wife’s sensitive nerves.
Given some time, everything would return to normal.
Just then, he received a phone call.
After listening, Steve instinctively glanced at his preoccupied wife beside him but said nothing more.
The call was from the cemetery management. They called to say Ellen’s body had disappeared.
At this critical juncture, he naturally wouldn’t add to Linda’s distress and decided to keep this matter hidden.
After turning off the lights, the two lay down facing completely opposite directions.
There was no argument, no emotional conflict.
But a rift had already formed between them.
The misery of having no one to confide in led Linda, taking advantage of a day when she was home alone during the daytime, to go out and actively seek out a support group.
Here, people all suffered from the loss of loved ones. Confiding in each other could help them emerge from the shadows.
Here, facing strangers who were unrelated yet shared similar circumstances, she could finally pour out the secret buried in her heart for years and speak her true feelings.
“My brother hanged himself due to severe mental issues.”
“Before his death, he left a suicide note, directly stating it was all because of our mother.”
“Saying she tried to force another soul into his body.”
“Soon after that, I cut off ties with my mother. With my husband’s help, I emerged from the psychological shadow.”
“To avoid repeating the same mistake, after confirming our first child was a boy,
my husband forbade my mother from having any contact or communication with me and the child.”
“This situation only improved after the second child was born…”
The people below listened quietly to Linda’s account.
Originally somewhat halting, her language grew smoother as she expressed her emotions.
Immersed in the relief brought by confiding, Linda didn’t notice that most of the people in front of her looked familiar.
After she finished speaking, everyone present wore “encouraging” smiles, and applause broke out one after another…
Looking at the crowd below, Linda also wore an expression of relief…
