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Because this house remembers.
It remembers my grandmother’s laugh echoing down the stairs. It remembers her gentle humming late at night, the whisper of her slippers on the floor. It remembers the nights she held my hand after my father vanished for months at a time.
“This is your home,” she told me softly. “No matter who comes back pretending otherwise.”
The house listened.
The second night, the scream is worse.
This time, my father hears it.
He charges down the hallway half-dressed, shouting her name, panic tearing through his voice. I stay in my room, counting sounds—the running, the sobbing, the dull thump against the wall.
“There’s nothing there,” he insists shakily.
“There was,” Marla cries. “Something was standing at the bed.”
“You’re imagining things,” he snaps, fear bleeding into anger.
Then the door slams.
On the third night, she refuses to sleep upstairs.
She curls up on the living room couch with every lamp blazing. I watch from the stairwell as she drifts off and jerks awake again and again, like prey waiting for the strike.
At 2:17 a.m., the air turns icy.
Her breath fogs.
The grandfather clock ticks backward.
She bolts upright.
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