Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I WOKE UP to a knock.

Not Evelyn.
Not a steward.
A child.

Maybe seven years old. Dressed in tiny suspenders and a cap three sizes too big. Freckles. Eyes like trouble.

“You’re the time guy, right?” he said.

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

He stepped inside without waiting.
Pulled a crumpled note from his pocket and handed it to me.

It was blank.

“I found that in my cereal,” he said seriously.

“You found a blank note in your cereal?”

“No. Now it’s blank. It had words before.”

I stared at him.

“What did it say?”

He leaned in like it was a conspiracy.

“Don’t trust the man with the purple gloves.”

I blinked. Twice.

“What man?”

He shrugged. “You tell me. You’re the time guy.”

“I’m not the time guy.”

“You’re totally the time guy. My sister said you glow.”

“I do not glow.”

He pointed to my pocket.

“The watch.”

I looked down. My hand had already moved to it.

He grinned. “See?”

Then he turned and bolted out the door, leaving me with the blank note and the kind of silence you don’t usually get before breakfast.

So that was the tone of my morning.

Weird.
Bent at the edges.
The kind of thing you’d laugh off—except I couldn’t.

Because as I stepped out into the hallway…
I passed a man in a navy coat.

And he was wearing purple gloves.

He didn’t look at me. Just kept walking.
Tall. Upright. Like a statue learning how to move.
The gloves were velvet. Deep, royal purple. Almost too bright.

And something about him made my stomach coil.

I followed.

Just for a moment.

Down a hallway. Around a corner.
And then—he was gone.

No door. No turn.
Just… gone.

Later, Evelyn found me.

She kissed me hello and asked why I looked like I’d seen a ghost.

I told her a kid had broken into my room and warned me about a guy with purple gloves.

She just nodded, dead serious.

“Yeah,” she said. “That makes sense.”

“Wait—what?”

She tilted her head. “Have you seen the cat yet?”