Reclamation

Paige

Tom led me up the stairs to the Mansion, the building where my nightmare started, and I dimly remembered just waking up in the basement the first time around. This close, I could see the banner much more clearly. Raphael’s Angel Haven – North Philadelphia. The sign looked hand-lettered and sloppy, like Tom or one of the contractors had painted it at the last minute. I ran my hand over the outside, trying to convince myself the sky-blue paint was real.

“I’m sorry I hid this from you,” Tom said as he pulled out a ring of keys. “It just took so long, and you kept getting more and more stressed, so it seemed smarter and smarter to just make the aesthetic decisions and let you change them if you wanted.”

He unlocked the door and pushed it open. The foyer of the Mansion spread out in front of me. The beautiful wood floor remained, and so did the sweeping staircases, but everything else had been changed. The dour walls became pastels much like the ones Sera and I had agonized over for