The Night the Curtains Moved

Chapter 1: Sound at night

The old house was sold many years later, but the neighbors still remembered the night the curtains moved.

They always said the strangest part was not the cold touch, not the candle flickering in the darkness, not even the sound that came from an empty room.

The strangest part was that the person who appeared that night had been dead for three months.

My mother never called it a ghost story.

She hated that word.

Whenever someone asked her about that night, she would become quiet for a moment, looking somewhere far beyond the walls around her.

“She didn’t come to scare me,” my mother would say. “She came because she promised she would.”

And that was the part that frightened people the most.

Because sometimes the things that return are not the things that hate us.

Sometimes they are the things that love us too much to leave.