Valerica Steele Dad -

“You left .”

And for the first time since she was ten years old, Valerica Steele believed.

“I know.”

She closed her fingers around the vial.

And there, sitting on an overturned crate, was a man who had been dead for fifteen years. valerica steele dad

The official report said accidental drowning. Valerica, age ten, had said nothing. But she’d watched the tide pull his footprints away, and something inside her had calcified into stone. She drove nine hours to the coast, past towns that blurred into salt-stained memory. The lighthouse stood exactly as she remembered: whitewashed, skeletal, its beacon long dark. The door wasn’t locked. Inside, the air tasted of rust and old rain.

Her father, who had walked into the sea on her tenth birthday. Valerica had spent a decade convincing herself she was fine. She’d built her reputation on skepticism because belief had cost her too much. Her father, Elias Steele, had been the real deal—a folklorist who could walk into any town and leave with three new legends and a scar. He’d believed in everything: kelpies, shadow men, the soft whisper of the huldra in the birch woods. “You left

Valerica Steele had never believed in ghosts.