The journey back to the convent was not dramatic. No one scaled fences or crept under moonlight. A van borrowed from an old pupil brought them up the winding road from Elsbethen. Three boxes of belongings rested between them: shawls, prayer books, rosaries, a framed photograph of young girls in uniform lined up before the castle gates.

Sister Bernadette, the eldest at eighty-eight, sat straight-backed, her hands folded as though she were still in chapel. Beside her, Sister Regina tapped her fingers restlessly against her lap. Sister Rita pressed her face close to the window, impatient for the first glimpse of the towers.

When the van curved the final bend and Schloss Goldenstein came into view, the sisters breathed as one.

“There it is,” Rita whispered, voice breaking. “There.”

The locksmith met them at the heavy doors. His tools clinked against the silence. When the lock gave, the hinges groaned open onto a hall dusted in neglect. The smell of damp stone rose to meet them. No water, no power, only the draft through corridors once filled with voices.

Bernadette stepped across the threshold first. “It smells the same,” she said, and for a moment her face softened. “I am home.”

The days that followed were an odd mixture of work and remembrance. By candlelight the sisters tidied what they could. Regina, once headmistress, directed the effort. She had the same sharp tone that once ordered classrooms of restless children.

“Tables there. Chairs along the wall. As we used to. Do you remember?”

Her voice echoed in the long refectory. Rita laughed as she brushed away cobwebs. “Inspection day. You made them polish until they cried. And then you praised them and gave them jam.”

Regina coughed until her chest rattled, but her eyes glowed. “I hear them even now,” she said. “Feet scurrying down the hall. Girls singing. The clatter of plates. It is all still here.”

Bernadette said little, working slowly, her movements deliberate. She paused often, her gaze drifting up to the rafters. Once she whispered, almost to herself: “The years are stored in these stones. They press down.”

That evening Rita made plum dumplings from flour found in a forgotten cupboard. The smell filled the convent, and for a moment the castle seemed warm again. They sat around a single candle, steam rising between them.

“I was always homesick at the care home,” Rita said. “But here, even with the cold, I am content.”

Bernadette set down her spoon. “I was obedient all my life,” she said, her voice thin but steady. “This time I chose not to be. And for this, I thank God.”

At night the castle changed. The corridors seemed longer. The candlelight stretched the sisters’ shadows across the walls until they looked like younger women, striding fast with purpose. Regina stopped more than once in the hall and said, “Listen. Do you hear them?”

The others strained their ears. Faint, perhaps imagined, came the sound of distant laughter. A door shutting. A bell.

In her room, Rita woke with the sensation of someone smoothing her blanket. She turned and saw, only for an instant, a girl’s figure standing in the doorway.

Regina dreamed of lessons. She stood at the chalkboard, her hands white with dust. The girls chanted back their Latin. She woke gasping, her room too silent, her name whispered faintly by no voice she recognized.

Bernadette did not sleep. She sat upright, rosary in her lap. She watched the crucifix’s shadow slide unnaturally across the stone floor, stretching as if pulled by invisible hands. She muttered her prayers, but when she closed her eyes the shadow lingered, creeping nearer.

The third night, they gathered in the chapel. No electricity lit the altar, but moonlight spilled through stained glass, silvering their faces. They prayed together, their voices low. When the wind rushed through the cracks it sounded like the breath of a congregation.

Rita broke the silence after the prayers. “Do you think they let us come back because they pitied us?”

“No,” Regina said quickly. “We came back because we belong.”

Bernadette lowered her head. “We came back because it is nearly time.”

The others turned to her. She looked older than her years, her face hollowed by shadows. “Do you not feel it? The convent welcomes us, but not as it once did. It remembers what we gave it, and it will keep us. Until the end.”

The wind rose in the rafters. Somewhere, faint but clear, a bell tolled.

In the days that followed, the sisters moved like women half in the present, half in the past. They polished tables that no students would use, swept halls no boarders would run through, laid out places at the refectory as if preparing for a meal that would never arrive.

And yet, something did arrive. Their memories grew sharp, immediate. Rita spoke of her first teaching day as though it had happened that morning. Regina described students by name, children long buried, their voices still ringing in her ears. Bernadette remembered every vow, every hour in chapel, every confession.

But behind their joy grew a tremor of dread. They saw shadows move when no one walked. They heard laughter carried down empty corridors. At night, in the chapel, they prayed louder to drown out the whispers that seemed to come from the pews.

One evening, as candles flickered low, Rita served plum dumplings again. She placed the bowl before Bernadette, who stared into the steam as though reading something.

“What do you see?” Regina asked.

Bernadette looked up. Her eyes were clear, almost shining. “I see the girls. I see the sisters. I see us, all of us, gathered at last. They are waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” Rita whispered.

“For us,” Bernadette said simply. “For us to stay.”

A silence fell, heavier than any before. In it, each woman felt the weight of her years, the approach of the end, the certainty that their rebellion had not been against the Church or the care home but against time itself.

And yet in that silence, each felt also a strange peace. If the convent had called them back to die, then at least it was here, in the place where they had lived, where they had taught, where they had prayed and been prayed for.

The castle would outlast them. Its stones would hold their voices, their shadows, their footsteps, just as it held the echoes of generations before.

Bernadette lifted her spoon, steady now, and smiled faintly. “I am so pleased to be home.”

The others echoed her, voices soft, trembling with both fear and thanksgiving.

Outside, the bell tolled again. Whether it was memory or wind, they no longer asked.