The Museum of the Lost Girls Life

Marie Wildapple spent the first ten summers of her childhood cradled in Veilwood Valley — a place where the air always seemed to shimmer with secrets, and sunlight slipped through the leaves as if it had somewhere important to go.

She had arrived as a chocolate-smudged toddler trailing behind a mother who seemed barely older than a girl herself. Her mother fit effortlessly into Aunt Gabrielle’s perfectly arranged world, while Marie… did not. Gabrielle’s house ran on rules — quiet rules, strict rules, endless rules. And for a child built from curiosity, those rules felt like a shrinking cage.

Early on, Marie learned something adults often forget:

Some houses make you feel cherished; others make you feel like a responsibility someone forgot to put down.

Her mother glowed in Gabrielle’s orderly home, chatting softly with her cousin Olivia. Their whispered jokes and half-hidden smiles created a world Marie wasn’t invited into. Whenever she wandered near, their conversations folded up like wings. She didn’t understand why — only that she did not quite belong.

So she looked for belonging where she always found it: the woods of Veilwood.

But her woodland wanderings pleased no one except herself. “A child has no business roaming the forest alone,” Aunt Gabrielle declared. “Who knows what dangers would love to find her?”

So Marie was sat at the dining table with schoolwork while the apples in the fruit bowl watched her with the same bored, resigned expression she often wore.

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Everything changed the winter her little sister was born.

Elisabetta — pale, delicate, startlingly beautiful — became the family jewel the moment she opened her eyes. Praise followed her like sunlight. Meanwhile, people looked at Marie… and often didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t ugly. She simply wasn’t extraordinary in the way adults gush over.

That summer Marie discovered a new ache:

the quiet pain of being tolerated while someone else is adored.

Yet invisibility has its uses.

Everyone’s attention was fixed on Elisabetta, leaving Marie free to slip through the edges of the house and into the forest. She even developed a method: talk loudly, interrupt the adults, irritate them just enough so they dismissed her — then vanish.

Veilwood always welcomed her back.

She collected strange stones, sketched scarlet mushrooms, pressed flowers between stolen book pages, whispered her worries into ferns, spied on magpies through a pilfered pair of binoculars. She never went far enough to lose sight of the house, and she always returned when the scent of gardenias drifted from Aunt Gabrielle’s prized shrubs.

Until, one day, the gardenias didn’t bloom.

That evening she didn’t smell dinner the way she always had. When the house called her name, dusk was already thickening into night. She ran — but Aunt Gabrielle met her at the door, anger sharp as bitten frost.

The punishment was swift:

a week locked in the attic room.

The attic was not unpleasant — a plush bed, a valley view, shelves of books, old photographs, a globe, even a telescope. It might have felt like an adventure, if not for the door.

That door.

It stood in the darkest corner of the room, where neither sun nor lamplight ever seemed to reach. Even in summer heat, that corner stayed cold enough to mist the window. At night the door made a thin, aching squeak, as though something behind it shifted when the house slept.

Whenever she asked, the adults said the same thing:

“Nothing. We don’t go in there.”

Marie tried ignoring it. She really did. But forgotten children notice things. And she had noticed the brass dish on Aunt Gabrielle’s dresser downstairs — a catch-all for old keys.

One key in particular: narrow, worn smooth from years of use.

Years of use for what?

The next evening she slipped it into her pocket.

The following morning, when the house buzzed with chores and distractions, Marie turned the key in the attic lock. It fit perfectly. The latch gave a soft click, like a sigh.

Inside, she found another bedroom — warmer than expected, dust-softened, quiet in a strangely alive way. Clothes lay neatly draped on a chair. Crayons were spread across a faded rug. A hairbrush sat on the dresser with golden strands still curled in its teeth.

It looked as though the girl who owned it would return before nightfall.

Except she never had.

Marie backed out of the room, heart thudding — and ran straight into Olivia.

Caught.

Olivia sat her down on the edge of the bed. Her voice, when she spoke, carried a practiced steadiness.

“That room belonged to my sister,” she said. “She died before I was born.”

Marie felt the room tilt.

Olivia continued, quieter: “She wandered into the forest alone and never came home. They found her by the river a few days later. My mother locked the room after that, hoping grief wouldn’t follow.”

Her breath wavered. “But grief doesn’t stay where you put it. It seeps into everything.”

Then, with a sad almost-smile:

“Mother says you remind her of her.”

Suddenly, Marie understood why this house felt so heavy, so rule-bound. She had been living in the shadow of a child frozen in memory. The rules weren’t to tame her — they were to protect her, desperately, irrationally, from the same fate.

For the first time, Marie wasn’t angry. She was heartbroken for all of them.

Later, when the house slept, she returned to the locked room. On the dresser she placed a small compass pin her grandmother once gave her — a quiet offering.

A promise.

“Just in case,” she whispered, “you ever want help finding your way home.”