The apartment felt denser that morning, like the air had been poured into a narrower bottle. Lynn Xu moved through it as if negotiating a roomful of glass—careful, slow, aware of every shift in light. The red bruise around her wrist throbbed when she lifted her hand; her palm went cold at the memory of Eli's touch.
She told herself to be practical. To act like the kind of person who could measure phenomena by logic.
She told herself a lot of things.
When she checked her phone, Cyrus hadn't answered. That silence sat heavier than the bruise.
There was a knock—soft and proper—at her door, and Lynn almost sobbed with relief. She opened it to find Mrs. Hale standing there again, cardigan buttoned, hands clasped like someone about to pass along a secret.
"I thought it best to come by," Mrs. Hale said without preamble. "How are you holding up, dear?"
Lynn forced a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I'm… trying."
Mrs. Hale glanced toward the hallway with a small, practiced anxiety. "You saw the name. You heard the footsteps. Good. That means what I told you landed. But listen—there's more. Pay attention to the walls."
Lynn blinked. "The walls?"
"The house moves," Mrs. Hale said simply. Her voice was low, a ledger closed carefully. "Not furniture. Not light. Doors and passages. Sometimes you'll think you remember a doorway and it will be gone. Sometimes one will appear where nothing was before."
Lynn had a memory—an impression really—of a narrow door, a frame like a bruise on plaster. She had felt its cold rim under her palm and then, minutes later, touched only a wall. She kept that to herself, because it sounded like madness.
"Why?" she asked. "Why would a house do that?"
Mrs. Hale's face folded into a tired map. "To hide things. To protect or to trap. Depends which way you look at it."
Before Lynn could reply, like an echo of the subject closing, a soft scraping sound came from the corridor outside—subtle as a page turning. Mrs. Hale went still.
"Don't go out alone tonight," she advised. "And do not — under any circumstance — engage him."
"Engage him?" Lynn's throat tightened. "You mean Eli."
"Speak his name, look him in the face, answer him when he calls," Mrs. Hale said. "He remembers pieces of being human; he remembers wanting. Those things get stronger when you respond."
Lynn thought of the single line in dust—Eli—on her threshold. She remembered the whisper, the way the apartment seemed to inhale with him.
That night, she walked the rooms again, inspecting plaster and skirting boards with new suspicion. The apartment looked ordinary in the electric glare—kettle, stack of mail, the crooked painting above the sofa she had not yet hung properly. But every time she turned a corner she felt the barest hint of mismatch, like a sentence that had been slightly mistranslated.
She found a faint scratch on the wall near the hallway—a shallow curve like the beginning of a letter. Her fingertip hovered over it. It felt fresh.
Lynn's heartbeat accelerated. She traced the mark and realized with cold clarity that it aligned with where a door frame should be. Her chest narrowed. A memory uncoiled: the edge of a frame, the shadowed seam, the way her skin had pressed against split wood.
She knocked on the wall half in disbelief. The knock returned solidly, as if the wall were whole. She pressed her ear; there was no hollow sound. No place to slip through.
Later, in the dark when the heater clicked and died and the hallway light buzzed, she heard steps. Not the long, lazy shuffle of the building settling—the kind she'd rationalized away before—but deliberate, soft, pacing in the corridor right outside her door. She hugged a blanket tight and waited, the way someone waits for a train they hope won't arrive.
When she cracked the door to peer out, the light in the hall stuttered and for a sliver of a second—only a sliver—she saw it: a shadow at the end of the corridor, too tall and wrong, like a photograph with someone sleeping behind translucent glass. When she blinked, the shadow slid away and the hall was empty.
Lynn sank onto the sofa, the phantom of the door pressing against her ribs.
If the apartment could erase a doorway, she thought, what else could it hide or give up?
And who decided?
She thought of Cyrus—of his guarded eyes, the way he carried other people's grief like something he'd been practicing with for years. He had said he'd make sure she was safe. He had not said he would come that night.
The hallway light hummed, and somewhere—very faintly—something scraped like a slow thumb across wood. Lynn pressed her palms against her ears as if that could stop sound from getting into her head.
At the far end of the corridor, where the scratch on the wall had been, a darker line was forming, subtle and patient. It wasn't the house moving this time as much as something drawing itself back into being—an outline growing from nothing. The edges of it were exact, like a letter being traced by someone who knows the alphabet already.
When midnight came it was no longer a memory or a shadow. The doorway was returning.
Lynn did not sleep at all.