Mira backs against the oak and slides down until she's sitting in the roots, the paper spread flat across her knees. She blocks out the mill, the groaning wheel, the flicker that may or may not have been a candle. Just the symbols. She lets her eyes go soft, the way her grandmother taught her when searching for a pattern in embroidery — don't hunt, let it come. And it does. The reaching hands. She's seen them stitched in faded blue thread on the inside cover of the old journal her grandmother kept on the highest shelf and never explained. The one Mira was told, firmly and twice, never to open. She closes her eyes and can picture the shelf perfectly: the journal, a small brass key hanging beside it on a nail, and a second book pushed behind it that she always assumed was nothing. Her pulse quickens. Home is twenty minutes away. But the light in the mill window flickers again — steadier now, unmistakably deliberate.