Closing Costs

Downstairs, the grandfather clock struck thirteen, paused, and then, almost apologetically, struck one.

The letters had been stuffed into the flue and forgotten, the paper brittle as moth wings. The first one began: If you are reading this, the house has chosen you too.

In the morning, the dust on the hall table showed a single handprint, small, like a child’s, pressed flat as if to hold something down.

---

The house was quiet in the way a held breath is quiet.

She did not sleep in the east bedroom again. The east bedroom did not seem to mind. It simply waited.

She told herself it was the pipes. Old houses knocked. Old houses sighed. Old houses did not, as a rule, whisper her name in her mother’s voice.