I stopped going by “Josie” the day I entered Miss Elbridge’s Orphanage.

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It was raining when I arrived—thin, cold, the kind that dampens wool coats and hairlines. A carriage dropped me at the black iron gate, and I stood alone as the driver lifted down my battered trunk and set it on the gravel. He didn’t wait for a tip, nor offer a word of comfort. He simply tipped his hat and was gone, wheels slick on the wet road.

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I was twelve years old. Drenched, shivering, and parentless.

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I remembered clutching the little suitcase in both hands, afraid to set it down in case it vanished too. Everything I owned fit inside it: a few dresses, two pairs of socks, a hairbrush, and a frayed photograph of my parents, edges curled and blurred where my fingers had touched it too often. My name— Josie Colway—was written on a tag, tied around the handle in my late mother’s looping hand. It was a name she’d chosen for me, Josephine, after my father, meaning “God shall add.” She said it was a name that bloomed with age. At twelve, I didn’t feel abundant. I felt unmoored.

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The gate squealed open against my weight. The orphanage loomed beyond it like something half-sketched in charcoal: tall, black-bricked, with high arched windows that let in no light. It was not the first time I’d seen it. When I was eight, my parents brought me here for a short visit. Miss Elbridge—Aunt Emma, they called her then, my father’s cousin—had twirled me in the garden while my father chuckled and my mother fussed with my hair. Emma Elbridge had been warm, then. Soft. Smiling.

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Now, two years later, she opened the front door in a black dress with high collars and tight sleeves, her dark hair pulled back into a sharp knot. Her face bore no trace of the woman who once spun me through the air like a child made of sunlight. Only her eyes remained the same—steel-grey, watching me like a clock measuring the wrong time.

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“You’ve grown,” she said, her voice cold and without inflection. She looked down at the trunk, then at the name tag. “Josephine.” From the corner of my eye I saw her flinch, like remembering my name stung. 

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I didn’t correct her. I didn’t speak at all.

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Inside, the hall was cool and dim, the wallpaper faded and floral in a way that once might’ve been cheerful. A great grandfather clock ticked softly in the entryway, marking time too slowly. The air smelled faintly of lavender water and boiled potatoes.

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“You will rise at six. Beds are made by six-fifteen. Chores rotate. You’ll be placed with the girls in the east wing. Meals are to be taken in silence unless given permission to speak. We value order here.” She didn’t look at me when she said it. She said it the way you would recite a prayer you no longer believed in—touched with finality and futility. I followed her down the corridor, my shoes echoing softly over the tile. 

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Shadows fell between the sconces along the wall, their light flickering as if uncertain of their existences. I felt one with the fire. 

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The girls’ dormitory was plain. Iron-framed beds with thin covers, trunks at the foot of each one. Miss Elbridge nodded at the empty bed in the corner.

“That will be yours. The girls will show you what to do.”

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I opened my mouth to ask something—anything—but she had already turned and left, her shoes clacking briskly down the hallway. The door closed behind her like a cell door locking.

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That night, I lay awake while the rain tapped against the high windows. The other girls were silent, either asleep or pretending to be. I traced my finger across the wooden slats of the bed frame, repeating to myself the nickname my parents had given me like a secret—Josie, Josie, Josie. Deep down, I was still Josie. Not Josephine Colway. Not a ward of this wretched place. Not desperately lonely. Just Josie. 

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When I closed my eyes, I dreamed of fire, of candlelight flickering. Of warmth crawling along curtains. Of something beautiful and dangerous dancing just beyond reach. And, in the center of it all, Miss Elbridge. Her face, calm, cold. Watching something burn.

***

Five years passed, five years where the orphanage taught silence before anything else.

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Silence at meals. Silence in the corridors. Silence while folding laundry or scrubbing stone steps with frozen fingers. The house itself seemed to enforce it, settling into long, creaking hushes like a creature listening for sound. There were no bells, no laughter, no impromptu games in the yard. Just the slow beat of daily routine, laid out like scripture by Miss Elbridge.

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She had an uncanny way of appearing exactly when you faltered—when a corner was missed during floor-polishing, when a button was stitched unevenly. Her presence didn’t fill a room. It pared it down, like cold steel scraping everything soft from the air. She never raised her voice. She never had to. One glance from her was enough to still a dozen children at once. Her rules and her rigid posture made the girls speak of her with something like fear and something more like awe.

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“She wasn’t always like this, Jo,” whispered a girl named Beatrice one evening, when we were folding sheets in the laundry room. She called me Jo. They all did. “They say she loved someone. Once. Years ago. And when he died, she became someone else. Someone—like this.”

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“Who was he?” I asked. It was the first question I’d asked since arriving.

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“No one knows. Some say he was a ward here. Others say a fiancé. But there was a fire, before this became the orphanage. The house burned—except this wing. Everything else was gutted. He died in it… whoever he was.”

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I didn’t respond. But suddenly, something stirred at the edges of my memory: the smell of smoke, the sudden heat. A scream.

No—just dreams, I told myself.

*** 

Five years after my arrival, two new children were brought in. Ruth and Harold.

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They came together, though they weren’t siblings. Ruth was fifteen and tall, with messy curls and the sharp eyes of someone who noticed everything. Harold was small and soft-voiced, already elegant at sixteen, and too pretty for the world he’d been born into. Miss Elbridge gave them the same clipped welcome she gave all of us, but I saw something flicker in her eyes when Harold bowed his head politely.

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We were placed in the same chore group. We peeled potatoes together, dusted the high stair railings, gathered linens from the yard. Slowly, the silence that wrapped the orphanage like gauze began to loosen, at least among the three of us. At night, when the wardens were asleep and the shadows felt kind, we whispered our dreams.

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“I want to be a poet,” Ruth would say. “Live in a bookshop above a bakery, drink tea until I die of it.”

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“I want to play piano in Paris,” Harold would sigh. “I want to wear velvet jackets and never scrub anything again.”

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“And you?” Ruth would ask, nudging me.

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“I don’t know,” I would whisper. “Write, maybe. See the world. Find somewhere that doesn’t smell like… like punishment. And that terrible carbolic soap.”

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We promised we’d escape together. We’d save our pennies, wait until we were seventeen, and run away to America. There, we told ourselves, the world would be new. There would be jazz and newspapers and open skies. There would be colour. At the time, we believed it. We believed it so deeply it hurt.

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One afternoon, while cleaning the attic storeroom, I found a broken music box under a heap of linens. The metal was tarnished, but when I twisted the key, it played a single chiming note before falling silent. 

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I brought it down to Harold. “I’ll fix it,” he said with a smile. “It’s a start.”

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Miss Elbridge caught us that night—Ruth reading by candlelight, Harold winding the music box, and me sketching a map of imagined escape routes under the covers. She said nothing, just stared, then left, the door clicking shut behind her.

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None of us slept that night. Something had changed. We felt it, even if we couldn’t name it yet.

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I watched the moonlight slant across the floor and imagined striking a match, just to watch the tiny fire bloom. Just to feel something warm.

***

I turned seventeen in the middle of winter.

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There was no cake, no song, no candle. Miss Elbridge didn’t acknowledge birthdays unless they fell on chore rotations or meal planning. Only then, you might receive a nod—the closest thing to affection she ever allowed herself.

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On the morning of my birthday, I found an envelope slipped beneath my pillow. No handwriting. No seal. Inside was a brass lighter.

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It was beautiful—strange and delicate. The body was etched with twisting vines, and on the lid, a lion’s head bared its teeth, proud and fierce. It was clearly old, belonging to a pair of hands older than mine. I hadn’t owned anything so fine since before the accident. Since my mother’s laughter filled our parlour and my father let me dip my fingers in ink while he scribbled letters in his study.

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I didn’t show it to Ruth or Harold. I told myself I meant to—but something about the lighter felt... secret. It was warm in my palm, even unlit.

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That night, while the dormitory slept, I sat on the sill of the east wing window and flicked the lid open.

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Click.

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A soft flame sparked to life.

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And in the glass pane in front of me—just for a moment—I saw a boy standing at the far end of the hallway behind me.