Claire Adams. The calmest person Jane knows, which Jane finds either deeply comforting or faintly suspicious depending on her mood.

Jane opens her inventory mid-conversation. She removes the GameSpot magazine — the one Colby was apparently reading when he decided the game was bad — and walks to the living room fireplace, which is lit because her mother likes fires and also, Jane suspects, dramatic ambiance.

She throws the magazine in. The flames accept it immediately. Enthusiastically, even.

Static. The call crackles, stutters, and dies.

Silence.

Jane stares at her phone. Then at the now-fully-burning magazine. Then back at her phone.

Jane opens the front door. Steps outside. The street is empty — genuinely empty, the kind of empty that feels less like absence and more like the world holding its breath. Halloween decorations shiver in the wind. Dry leaves skitter across the asphalt and then stop, as if they too are waiting for something.

She walks to the mailbox. Opens it.

Empty.

The wind whistles through it, which is the universe's way of saying hi, nothing for you today either.

Jane stands at the mailbox for a long moment. She buries her face in her hands. She breathes out.

Then her phone rings.

She stops talking.

Because there it is.

A butterfly. Blue — not the ordinary blue of sky or water, but something brighter, something that shouldn't exist in the muted palette of a cloudy October afternoon. It hovers in front of her like it has been waiting patiently for her to notice it. Its wings move slowly, without urgency.

It looks, with an accuracy that Jane will not appreciate until much later, exactly like the butterfly from Persona.

The butterfly turns. Begins to drift — slow and deliberate, like a sentence being spoken one word at a time. Jane follows it. She is not sure she decided to. Her feet are just moving.

It leads her around the side of the house. Along the wall. To the kitchen window.

And there — sitting on the outside sill like it grew there, bright red against the gray stone — is a package. Shiny. Gift-wrapped. Definitely not there before.

She looks up at the sky, then at the butterfly, which seems to have no further agenda. Her expression is triumphant and slightly unhinged.

Jane enters the kitchen at speed.

Her mother is standing in the center of the room. She is holding a birthday cake. The cake has candles. Her mother's expression is sweet. Her eyes gleam with something that is not sweet at all.

Jane stops. She assesses. She unequips the disguise glasses and moves them to her combat slot. She grips her hammer. She takes a stance that she has clearly not practiced but commits to fully.

Her mother is right there. Inches away. Smiling the smile of someone who attended a cake decorating workshop and came back different.

Jane, operating on pure instinct, shoves the disguise glasses onto her face.

She is not sorry. She grabs the red package from the windowsill. She runs.

Jane takes the stairs two at a time. Behind her, from the kitchen, the sound of slow, deliberate footsteps crosses the floor. The lights in the hallway flicker once.

She does not look back.