The agent didn't tell them the price until the drive home, and she said it like an apology. Sixty-one thousand. Eleven rooms, a wraparound porch. Mara signed before Daniel finished reading. That first night they slept on a mattress in the parlor. Above them, a floorboard creaked. Then again, slow and even, like someone pacing the room overhead. They were alone in the house.

Daniel turned on his phone flashlight and headed for the stairs. "It's just the house settling," he said, but his voice shook. Mara followed. At the top of the steps, the pacing stopped the second their feet hit the landing. Every door up there was shut. They didn't remember closing them.

Daniel opened the nearest door. An empty bedroom, bare floor, one window. But the floorboards in the center were worn smooth in a long oval, exactly the shape of someone walking the same path for years. The wood was warm. He stepped onto it without meaning to.

Mara yanked him off the worn boards. The warmth drained out of the wood at once, leaving it cold. Scratched into the floor at the edge of the oval were tiny tally marks, hundreds of them, like someone counting days. The last few looked fresh and new.

Daniel counted the fresh marks. Two new ones, side by side. "Two," he said. "It started counting us the night we moved in." Behind them the bedroom door swung shut, and the lock turned from the inside. The hall stretched longer than the house could be, doors going down into the dark, and behind every one of them, feet were pacing. The house had been full all night. They just hadn't been counted in yet.