The woman knelt in the earth, her fingers woven through the roots like she was praying to something older than gods. Her hair hung in ropes of grey, tangled with small white blossoms that had never seen the sun. She did not look up as Root approached, but her hands stilled.
"I remember when they put me in," she said. Her voice was like paper dissolving in water. "I remember the taste of soil, the weight of it on my tongue. I remember thinking: this is what love tastes like when it's been buried too long."
Root's breath caught. The woman turned, finally, and her face was Root's face—aged, hollowed, eroded by years of slow growth through dark places. The same cheekbones. The same quiet set of the jaw.
"You're the first seed," Root whispered.
"I'm the first silence," the mother said. "I am what happens when a daughter's voice is swallowed whole and planted in concrete. I grew root instead of wings. I grew stems instead of hands. I grew a garden that consumed the house that consumed me."
She held out her hand, and Root saw it was not a hand at all—it was a root system, branching and dividing, capillaries of bark and hunger. The fingers moved like roots seeking water.
"You have a choice," the mother said. "You can let the seed bloom into the door, and let the house crumble. You can free the acre, and every child the Stepmother ever buried. Or—" and her voice lowered, becoming the sound of soil shifting. "You can plant me there. In your place. Let the garden take what it was always meant to take."
Root saw the door behind her, the bright acre of morning, the child waiting at the far edge, still holding the folded note. She saw Tana at the threshold. The small girl at the center of the acre—her own face—hold something dark in her hands. Not paper. Not a seed.
"Tana?" Root said, but the child at the center of the acre raised her hand.
The soil in Root's mother's palm began to shift. And from that soil rose a sound—not a scream, but a song. A song so old, so buried, so full of the nameless what-ifs that it had no words—
A song that knew the way home.
And it was singing *to* the door.