"The Girl Who Stayed Behind the Walls"

There’s something about Clara that never quite leaves you.

I remember writing her the way one would whisper a secret into a room that shouldn’t echo. I didn’t plan for her to stay. She was meant to be a shadow in the corner, a child with hollow eyes and a stitched-up mouth who flickered between pages and vanished like breath on glass. But some characters refuse to leave quietly. Clara clawed her way deeper.

And so The Last Page gave her a room.

For those who haven’t met her yet—Clara is the pale girl locked in the attic in one of the book’s darker short stories. The house she haunts is not just brick and wood, but memory, guilt, and a terrible silence that grew so loud it fractured the walls. The woman who moves in believes the sounds are pipes, rats, the creaking of old bones settling in old places. But we know better. Don’t we?

Clara doesn’t scream. She taps. Slowly. Three times. Then silence.

There’s a reason for that, and if you’ve read between the lines, you already feel it in your chest. Clara was forgotten. Not in death—but in life. Locked away for being too strange, too quiet, too uncomfortable. She was the child they couldn’t explain, the secret they wanted to bury under wallpaper and prayers.

And yet… she stayed.

Writing her story was, in many ways, writing a eulogy for every part of us we’re told to suppress. The sensitive child. The quiet watcher. The one who saw too much, felt too deeply, and made others uncomfortable with our silences. Clara is grief with a face. She is the manifestation of what happens when pain is ignored until it festers into something sentient.

Her story was never meant to end when the page turned. She lingers in the mirror. In the corners of the next story. She might even be part of Echoes in the Static—but I won’t confirm or deny. (Let’s just say… reflections don’t always show what’s really behind you.)

So yes. I love Clara.
Because Clara is the girl who stayed.
And some ghosts deserve to be heard.

Until the next whisper,
Ana