CHAPTER ONE — The Teacup Test

The first time Emma brought Nikola to meet her family, he broke a porcelain teacup.

It was not spectacular—just a slight knock of his elbow against a low lacquered table. The cup tipped, spun once like a coin, and cracked against the floor. No one shouted. That was what unnerved him the most.

Her mother smiled like someone watching a house burn behind glass.

Emma had knelt beside him quickly, collecting the shards in her small hands. Her thumb bled where the porcelain cut her, but she didn’t flinch. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Accidents happen, babe.”

Nikola nodded, and then—for some reason he couldn’t explain—blurted out, “Do you want me to pay for it?”

It came out stupidly, like she had asked him about taxes or parking.

Emma’s cousin giggled behind her hand. Her grandmother whispered something in Vietnamese. Her father looked through Nikola like he wasn’t there at all.

That was the first time he saw the shape of the silence Emma carried around her. It was precise. Fragile. Ornamental. Like the teacup.

---

Later that night, when Emma curled against him on his couch, she asked gently, “Did I embarrass you tonight?”

And Nikola—heart thudding and tongue clumsy—responded, “No. I mean, yes. Not you. Me. The tea. The floor. I—uh—don’t usually drink out of things that fragile.”

She laughed. And he didn’t know why that made him ache.

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CHAPTER TWO — Do You Believe in Ghosts?

“Do you believe in ghosts?” Emma asked one night while brushing her hair in the mirror.

Nikola froze mid-buttoning his shirt. “Like... metaphorically? Or real ones?”

She raised a brow in the glass. “Real ones.”

“Uh.” He scratched his neck, felt sweat prickle even though the room was cold. “I mean, statistically, no. But emotionally? Sure. Yeah. Sometimes. Maybe. What kind?”

Emma didn’t answer. She kept brushing. Long, dark strands glided through the teeth of her comb like water down a stream.

That was her, always asking questions like riddles. Never forcing him to answer right. Just watching how he squirmed.

He tried again. “Is this, like, a cultural thing? Are we—are we going to visit someone’s grave?”

She turned to him with a tiny smile. “I think I’m haunted. That’s all.”

The room went still. Somewhere outside, a dog barked.

“Haunted like... by who?”

Emma shrugged. “A version of myself, maybe. The kind I wasn’t allowed to become.”

Nikola wanted to say something profound. Instead, he said, **“I can buy sage.”

She smiled, but the sadness never left her eyes.

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CHAPTER THREE — Missing

Nikola came home to find Emma’s shoes missing from the entryway.

That alone didn’t disturb him. She could be out. Maybe grocery shopping. Maybe with her cousin Lien, who always talked about taking her to get matcha or visit some obscure flower market.

But the apartment felt still. Like someone had pressed pause on their life.

He noticed the tea tin was gone from the counter. The one with Korean characters and a red wax seal. He’d watched her once open it like a sacred text, measuring out the leaves with reverent fingers.

On the fridge was a sticky note. No handwriting. Just a pressed cherry blossom.

Nikola stared at it for a long time.

Then he reached for his phone and called her. Straight to voicemail.

“Hey,” he said, his voice tight. “Are you with Lien? Or... someone? I just got home. Everything okay?”

The silence that followed made the back of his neck prickle.

He hung up, sat on the couch, and stared at the blossom like it might start talking.

An hour later, he called again. And again.

When Lien picked up, she said she hadn’t seen Emma in three days.

CHAPTER FOUR — Nikola: The Shrine Without a Name

Nikola stood at the threshold of Emma’s family’s side shrine.

It was tucked behind the main house, overgrown with bamboo and silent save for the wind chimes whispering above. Her family hadn’t returned his calls, so he came unannounced. Lien wasn’t home either—or was ignoring him.

He stepped over a rotting step. Inside: incense ash, paper money, and offerings of dried fruit. But what disturbed him was the framed photo on the shrine.

It wasn’t Emma. Not exactly.

It was a girl who looked like her, younger, in traditional Vietnamese áo dài, standing beside two women and a monk. No smile. Eyes hollow. The date stamped on the photo: 2003.

He backed away, heart pounding.

Behind him, someone cleared their throat.

It was Emma’s grandmother.

“You should not be here,” she said, in near-perfect English. “She is not yours to find.”

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CHAPTER FIVE — Emma: The Room with No Corners

There were no corners in the room they put her in.

Emma counted four smooth, concave walls—like a dome sliced into a square. The design disoriented her. No corners meant no shadows, and no shadows meant no secrets. That was the idea.

The voice behind the mirror kept saying, “You’ve forgotten your roots.”

They made her wear a ceremonial hanbok. Each morning, a tray of rice, dried fish, and bitter tea was slid through a slot in the wall. Someone burned incense until her lungs ached.

She was never beaten. Never tied.

Just… erased.

At night, she whispered her name over and over, trying to pin it to something real.

Emma Tran. Artist. Queer. Beloved. Still here.

But sometimes, she forgot.

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CHAPTER SIX — Nikola: Blood on the Receipt

Nikola sat in Emma’s old car. It still smelled faintly of her perfume—green tea and vanilla. In the glovebox, buried under napkins and pens, he found a gas receipt. Dated the day before she disappeared. Paid in cash.

From a station near Rainier.

The ink was smudged, but something darker caught his eye. A smear of dried blood on the edge.

Nikola stared at it like it might move.

She wasn’t clumsy. She was precise. Like that time, she’d stitched her own finger back together in their kitchen after slicing it on a mandoline. “Waste of an ER bill,” she’d said.

So, what had happened out there?

He punched the location into his GPS and drove, hands trembling the entire way.

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CHAPTER SEVEN — Emma: Ghost Lessons

They started giving her books.

Old texts. Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese parables. "Lessons in Lineage." She recognized a few. Others were altered. Words missing. Symbols redrawn.

Emma began keeping track of the contradictions.

One passage claimed:

"A woman who walks two paths will fall between them. Better to be rootless than corrupted."

She laughed when she read that. Bitterly.

She began scratching poems into the walls with a chopstick:

"My ghost doesn’t haunt the house. It builds it."

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CHAPTER EIGHT — Nikola: The Forest and the Lantern

Nikola hiked into the forest behind the gas station.

It was dusk, and the trees bled shadow. His boots crunched old pine needles and bone-dry leaves. There was no trail, just instinct—and a soft orange glow far ahead.

He followed the flickering light.

A lantern, half-sunk in moss, marked a clearing.

In the center stood a wooden post, wrapped in red string and old family photos pinned with rusted nails. Emma’s face stared out from one of them. But her eyes had been scratched out.

Nikola doubled over, nauseous.

Then, a sound: wind or whisper?

He turned too late—something cracked against his skull.

Darkness.

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CHAPTER NINE — Emma: Someone Else’s Name

They made her repeat it: “Ngọc-Hana.”

They said it was her true name. A name that belonged in the family. A name without blemish or shame.

Each time she refused, they took away something small—her chopsticks, her books, her light. Eventually, she ate with her hands in the dark.

But they couldn’t take her mind.

She began remembering Nikola’s awkward responses. His sideways smiles. The way he panicked whenever she asked philosophical questions. How he once said, “I love you,” followed by, “Is that the wrong time? I’m sweating. I think I’m sweating through my socks.”

That memory made her smile.

She carved his name beside hers on the wall with a splinter.

Emma + Nikola

Not erased. Not yet.

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CHAPTER TEN — Nikola: The Place with No Time

Nikola woke in a room of stone.

His head ached. The air smelled of ash and oil. A woman—older, wearing mourning robes—stood over him. She had Emma’s nose.

“You trespassed,” she said calmly.

“Where is she?” Nikola rasped. “Where’s my wife Emma?”

The woman shook her head. “Emma is gone. She was never meant to be. The bloodline corrects itself.”

Nikola tried to stand, stumbled. There were symbols chalked in a circle around him. Containment.

He did the only thing he could think of.

He laughed.

Loud, stupid, broken laughter.

Because no one had told him this was a cult. A cult dressed in heritage. A bloodline masquerading as salvation.

They’d tried to rewrite Emma. But she was the most real person he’d ever met.

He looked the woman dead in the eye and said, “You have no idea who you’re messing with.”