Epilogue: The Memory That Stayed

Years passed.

The house still stood.

Greymoor, quiet and unassuming now, no longer loomed with the weight of centuries. Ivy still crept up its stone, and rain still kissed the glass, but the mirrors held only reflections, and the clocks kept ordinary time.

No more gilded hours.

No more bargains with memory.

Eveline returned sometimes. Not as a prisoner of fate, but as a woman who had survived it.

She would walk through the overgrown gardens, touch the crumbling sundial, run her fingers across the chapel door.

Sometimes she whispered his name—Rowan—just to hear how it softened on her tongue after all the storms.

"We broke the hour," she'd say.

"But time still remembers."

Inside, the journals remained. Lady Harrow's script fading at edges, delicate and storm-torn. Eveline never burned them. She read them sometimes, and wept for the girl who had loved so hard it shattered the world.

"There was magic in what she did," she once wrote. "But there is grace in letting go."

She kept the locket.

Not around her neck, but in a drawer lined with letters and old photographs—proof that she had been two people, once.

And that both of them, in their own way, had loved.

As the sun set behind Greymoor one last time, Eveline stood at the edge of the west window—the place where the mirror had once stood.

And smiled.

Not with sorrow.

But with peace.

"Some houses hold you. Some haunt you. And some simply wait until you're ready to come home."