The Shape of Normal
Spring had a strange softness that year.
The air was damp and full of renewal, like the world was trying too hard to cleanse itself of memory. The grass grew thick again around the house, and the morning sun painted the walls gold.
Inside, everything began to look almost ordinary.
The twins, who once flinched at sudden noises and refused to eat more than a few bites, were beginning to act like themselves again. Elena laughed loudly now — a laugh that cracked through the house, the kind of sound that made her mother tear up without meaning to. Mara followed her everywhere, teasing, mocking, protecting — as if the six months they'd vanished had never existed.
They shared inside jokes again. They stayed up late watching movies.
They argued about chores and clothes and who took longer in the shower.
Their mother clung to every small, domestic irritation like it was a gift.
Even the mess they left behind — the trail of shoes, hair ties, and notebooks — filled her with quiet joy.
She had been afraid for so long that the house itself would forget how to sound like home.
Now, it did.
The father, though, moved differently through this new rhythm.
He smiled, yes. He listened when they spoke. He joined their laughter.
But a part of him still lived in the silence between words — the silence that had once filled every corner when they were gone.
He couldn't stop remembering the sketchbook. The strange drawings. The whispers that seemed to come from the trees. He had spent nights staring into those woods, convinced something alive had been watching them.
But now, there was nothing.
The oak tree stood still, its roots buried deep in quiet soil. No wind. No faces in the bark. The whispers had stopped completely, as if the forest itself had decided to forget.
He wanted to forget, too.
He wanted to stop thinking about how their voices sometimes overlapped in perfect rhythm. How they finished each other's sentences too neatly. How sometimes, when one of them blinked, the other seemed to flinch — like an invisible thread connected them still.
He tried not to notice. He tried to believe.
One night, he came home from work to find the three of them sitting at the kitchen table. His wife was laughing — really laughing — her eyes red from tears of relief. Mara was trying to teach Elena how to fold paper cranes, and both were failing miserably.
He stood there in the doorway, watching them.
And something loosened inside him.
For a long time, he had convinced himself that happiness like this couldn't be trusted — that something this peaceful had to be a trick. But standing there, watching his wife reach across the table to tuck a strand of hair behind Elena's ear, he realized how tired he was of being afraid.
He didn't want to search for differences anymore.
He didn't want to wonder if something else had come back in their place.
He just wanted to believe.
So he did.
He walked in, kissed his wife on the head, ruffled Mara's hair, and said, "You'll have to teach me that trick next."
And when they all laughed, he laughed too — not because it was easy, but because it was necessary.
In the following weeks, his life began to fill again.
He started returning to work on time, even joking with his colleagues. The neighbors stopped looking at them with pity. People waved from their porches again. The girls went back to school, brought home stories about teachers, classmates, and the occasional failed test.
They were living, and that was enough.
Sometimes, though, when he couldn't sleep, he would stand at their doorway and just watch. The twins always slept facing opposite directions, their breathing perfectly aligned, slow and even.
He found it beautiful. Comforting, even.
He never noticed the way their fingers twitched in unison, or the faint whisper of breath that seemed to rise between them — too low, too soft, almost like they were dreaming the same dream.
He only saw peace.
And the more he saw it, the more he believed it.
By early summer, the last traces of the strange vanished completely.
The sketchbook lay untouched in a drawer. The oak tree no longer haunted his periphery. The voices that once lingered behind walls were gone.
Every sign, every echo, every shadow — erased.
He began to tell himself that grief had made him delusional. That fear had rewritten the details of what happened. Maybe they had just been lost in the woods. Maybe the rest — the faces, the whispers, the pact — was just the human mind trying to make sense of trauma.
He began to say it out loud sometimes. To his wife. To himself.
"They're fine. They're fine. They're my girls."
And every time, it sounded a little more true.
Still, there were small moments that tugged at him — too faint to name, too easy to dismiss.
Once, he found Elena standing by the oak tree at dusk, her hand pressed to the bark. When he asked what she was doing, she smiled softly and said, "Just saying goodnight."
Another time, Mara dropped her bracelet in the dirt, and when he bent to pick it up, he could've sworn the ground beneath him hummed.
He told no one.
Because by then, he had decided:
these were his daughters.
And love, even when it knows something is wrong, learns how to lie to itself.