The girl I took in on a rainy night is slowly wal…

Lucian Calder moved away from his hometown five years ago and scraped by alone in an old apartment on the west side of the city. He squeezed onto the subway every day, worked overtime, and lived off convenience stores — his days like waste paper spat out by a photocopier. One rainy night, he found a girl in a tattered school uniform curled up at the stairwell entrance. Her long hair covered most of her face, and her eyes were hollow, blank, as if she had lost her soul. She said her name was Seraphina Vale. She had run away from home and had nowhere to go. On an impulse, Lucian Calder brought her back with him. He told no one. That room of his, which once took in stray cats, had seen no one visit in a very long time.