Chapter 1 — The House on Ashford Lane

The first thing Nora Calloway noticed about the house was that it looked like it was watching.She told herself that was the kind of thought you had when you'd been driving for seven hours with two children and a husband who believed GPS was a character flaw. She was tired. The light was falling at a particular angle — late afternoon, amber and slanted — that turned the upstairs windows into something that caught and held it wrong."Well," said her husband, David, stepping out of the car and stretching in the way that made his back crack. "There she is.""It's big," said Lily, age nine, from the backseat. She said this the way she said most things — with a careful neutrality that gave nothing away."It's huge," corrected her brother Owen, age twelve, who had his face pressed against the car window. "How many rooms?""Six bedrooms," David said, grinning. He had been grinning since they left the city. This was his dream — the old house, the yard, the small town. Nora had agreed to it because she loved him and because the alternative was watching him spend another decade quietly unhappy in a two-bedroom apartment, and because the price had been, in the realtor's careful phrasing, "reflective of the property's unique history."Which was the polished way of saying: three years empty, one family fled in the night, and a neighborhood that had developed a collective amnesia on the subject.Nora got out of the car and looked up at the house.Four stories, if you counted the attic. Victorian, built in 1887, with the original crown molding and a front porch that wrapped around the left side. The exterior was grey-blue, the paint peeling in some places but not badly. The garden had gone to enthusiastic wilderness — she'd have her work cut out there. There was a weather vane on the roof shaped like a rooster. It was not moving, though the evening air had a breeze in it.It was a beautiful house.She could not shake the feeling that it did not want them there."Nora." David had appeared at her side. He put a hand on her lower back. "It's going to be great."She smiled. It was not a difficult smile — she was not unhappy. She just wished, very briefly, that she could explain what she felt when she looked at those upper windows."Come on," she said instead. "Let's go in."* * *