My name is Evelyn Ashworth. If you are reading this, I am either dead or gone. I have written this account in the hope that someone will understand what happened here, and perhaps find a way to undo it.

But here was the thing about Brooke Beretta that the house did not yet understand: she was not the kind of woman who stayed eaten.

She set up her temporary living quarters in what had once been the butler's pantry—small, windowless, and defensible. Then she began her walkthrough.

The call came on a Tuesday in late October, when the rain was doing that particular Seattle thing where it wasn't quite falling but wasn't quite stopping either—a perpetual gray mist that clung to everything like a second skin.

She went to the basement. She opened the book again. And she began to read. The restoration of the Ashworth House took eleven months. When Brooke emerged in October of the following year, thin as a rail and white-haired at thirty-three, the house behind her was no longer a Victorian Gothic nightmare. It was a ruin—not the picturesque kind, but a true ruin, collapsed in on itself like a dying star. The obsidian walls of the basement had crumbled to dust. The faces on the banister had vanished, their wood rotten and hollow. The parquet floor was splinters.