CXLI

Four months after Henry's disappearance

Dear diary,

Living with Joyce and Hopper has been a good idea. Even though our house is smaller than the Creel mansion, I have my own room because Joyce asked Jonathan and Will to share one. I thought they wouldn't like this, but they agreed without complaining and even call me their 'sister'. That doesn't mean anyone asks me to use family titles (mom, dad, brother, etc.); they seem determined to give me a warm home and a family without expecting anything in return.

Coming from them, this doesn't surprise me, but as I write this, I am crying a little bit. Is this what having a family feels like? A mom, a dad, siblings…? Maybe it sounds like I'm being ungrateful to Henry, but that's not my intention. It's just that things with him were always different. Yes, different, even though we both wanted to live a normal life (me more than him, I know now, but he tried too, so, yeah…).

I can conclude I never saw Henry as an older brother or a father, even though I understand why everyone else assumed that's what he was to me.

This is just more proof that Henry and I are so much alike and yet so different from everyone else that our way of relating to each other was something else—something outside the norm.

Even so, I don't doubt for a second that Henry was… is my family.

And also, in a different way, so are Hopper, Joyce, Jonathan, and Will (and Poe, obviously).

I can only confidently say this now, tonight. Yes, because tonight, I finally found the courage to ask Joyce and Hopper if they really are okay with me staying here.

Especially after what they saw… that night.

When they heard my question, they exchanged a look that made it clear they'd already had a conversation about this. And before I could understand what this might mean for me, Joyce hugged me tightly.

And then Hopper hugged us both.

"All we saw that night," Hopper told me, "was a girl who finally got her freedom back after years of terror."

Hearing that, I hugged them too. And I cried a little.

And now I think…

I think I'm really lucky to have such a wonderful family.

To have Dad and Mom, even if it took me a long time to realize that's what they are to me…

Four months and fifteen days after Henry's disappearance

This version of the Creel mansion reminds him of the other Henry's: a house battered by time, a monument to a past life that feels more like a dream.

The house is exactly as he remembers it from his childhood. As it must have looked after the night of the murders.

There's no sign that anyone has lived in it since.

Yet Henry, with aching feet, ruined shoes, filthy clothes, and skin covered in sweat and grime, has no intention of leaving without examining every inch of the property he fought so hard to reach.

Starting, of course, with the attic—a sanctuary from another life that here is likely no more than an illusion.

…
And it is there that he finds her.

"E… leven…?" His voice comes out hoarse after days of silence, his tongue parched from thirst.

Before him, with her eyes closed, hangs an Eleven who looks eerily similar to the one he left behind—except, perhaps, for her freshly shaven head. She is suspended by grotesque crimson vines, the same ones that still haunt Henry's nightmares.

Mechanically, he steps closer, extending a hand with every intention of brushing her cheek.

And then, a voice breaks through the silence that has seeped into his bones for all these months: "That doesn't belong to you."