The Valemour Estate

For those who grieve what no one noticed missing.
For those who learned to be quiet
because nothing in the world ever answered back.

For those who wore joy like a costume,
because their sorrow was never safe in the open.

For those who flinched at kindness,
because it always came with requests.

For those who ache for places imagination invented,
and miss them as though they were real.

For those who buried the truest parts of themselves
just to be allowed to stay.

For those who keep trying to go home,
without ever knowing where that is.

For those who were devoured by demons anyway.

This is not the beginning of something new.
It is a return —
not to joy, or safety, or childhood,
but to the place where the forgetting first began.

I wrote this for her, for the girl I was.

For all the souls who learned to live with their ghosts.
And for anyone who has lived their life
in the wreckage of what they almost became.
…

And to my husband, Patrick.
Thank you for showing me what it feels like to be safe,
and loved, and home. I love you.

This work is fiction and at the same time, it isn’t. I wrote this story to preserve something that could not be said aloud when it was happening. And in truth, it took me two decades to find the words at all.

The Valemour Estate is imagined, but the emotions hidden in its halls and gardens are not. Each page was born of a real memory, altered by time, and offered now not as confession, but as a kind of reckoning.

It began as a series of artworks: quiet, visual interpretations. But the more I created, the more I found myself writing beside them, until the words became the true record. And the more I wrote, the more I returned to what wouldn’t let me go.

I have come to think of memory as a collection of selves. This is not a memoir. It is not quite a novel. It is a haunted book, not of ghosts, but of said selves. And in each artwork, each entry, you will find a character, most often a woman, who embodies one of those moments from my story.

The entries that follow are presented as they might have been found: folded into drawers, pressed beneath glass, scattered like seeds across the grounds of a forgotten home.

I don’t know if these pages will mean anything to anyone else. I only hope they reach you gently, the way I once needed them to meet me.

— Laura El

Journal entry by Valent L. Ona (February 1922)

I purchased the Valemour Estate in the autumn of 1921, after it had stood vacant for nearly two decades. Though the deed was signed in October, the grounds remained largely impassable until the first frost broke through the western overgrowth. Even then, the house revealed itself as little more than a shell, its windows sealed, its doors buckled from damp, the interior heavy with soot and rot.

Restoration began in early winter. During the initial clearing of the west library, I came upon the first writing: a single page, neatly folded and pressed into the spine of a discarded book. I thought little of it at the time. But more followed, a note behind a mirror, a scrap inside a child’s desk, a passage sealed behind a loose brick in the garden wall. Found mostly by chance, they bore the unmistakable quality of something private, and intentionally placed. A few were signed with initials, yet all, curiously, appeared to be written by the same hand.

I began to search for a diary, believing these to be fragments of a larger work. No such volume emerged—only solitary pages, scattered with intention. Later, while reviewing the estate’s records, I noticed peculiar alignments: official entries echoed the hidden pages, as if the documents preserved the fact of a moment while the writings held its sentiment.

The paintings were another matter entirely. Many remained where they had likely hung for decades. They seemed to hold something—moments—preserved with the same deliberateness as the writings. Seen together, the paintings, pages, and records felt less like embellishments and more like extensions of the same story.

I began to wonder whether these fragments might form something larger: not a conventional narrative, but the outline of a life, captured in pieces. I do not believe it was fiction. The details are too specific, the voice too intimate. And yet, some moments are so vivid they border on the unreal.

I have preserved the order in which the materials emerged and placed them alongside what they seemed to reflect. Whether they form a true narrative or merely trace the edges of someone’s life, I cannot say. But I do not believe they were left behind by accident.

This, then, is the book she never wrote.
V.L.O., November 26, 1922