Chapter 1
Kari
Halo City hits the windshield like a dare.
The skyline rises out of the coastal fog — glass towers, construction cranes, the dark spire of a cathedral that looks like it was built to judge you from a distance. The harbor stretches south, cargo cranes standing like skeletal sentries along the piers, and somewhere beneath the overpass a subway rumbles through its own underground kingdom. The air smells like brine, diesel, money that's been here longer than the buildings. Old-world church steeples shoulder up against tech campuses. A billboard for a waterfront condo development glows next to a boarded-up fish market with a hand-painted sign that reads SINCE 1947. The whole city has the energy of a place that got rich, got dangerous, got polished, and never fully scrubbed the danger out.
Sycamore Lane is three turns off the main drag, and the shift is immediate — brownstones, iron fences, trees old enough to vote. A neighborhood that the city grew around but never absorbed. Quieter. Older. The kind of block where people know each other's names and opinions.
The Foxglove Inn sits at the end of the block like it's been waiting.
The smell hits first — dust and old lavender and something deeper, something that might be wood rot or might be character. My great-aunt Margit would have called it character. She also called her cats by the wrong names for years, so her judgment isn't exactly the gold standard.
The key sticks in the lock the way the estate lawyer warned me it would. Jiggle left, then right, then apologize to it. He'd actually said that last part, straight-faced, like he'd been personally victimized by this door. I jiggle. I apologize. The lock gives with a grinding protest that I feel in my back teeth.
"Hi," I say to the Foxglove Inn. "I'm Kari. I'm going to live here now. Please don't fall on me."
The foyer answers with a creak that travels the full length of the second floor, like the house is stretching after a long nap. Three years empty. Three years of dust settling into every groove and crack, of wallpaper peeling in slow motion, of a garden gnome in the front garden bed standing guard over absolutely nothing.
I patted that gnome on the head on my way in. Chipped nose, expression that suggests he's seen things.
The light through the front windows is all wrong — gray and flat where the photos showed honeyed afternoon glow. Because of course the listing photos were lies. Gorgeous, seductive, real-estate-pornography lies, the kind that made me pull over at a rest stop outside of Tucson and cry into a gas station coffee because something this beautiful was mine.
What's actually mine: a foyer with water-stained crown molding, a staircase that curves like it was built to make women in long dresses look devastating, and wallpaper departing the walls with the quiet dignity of a guest who knows it's time to leave.
"It's fine," I tell the staircase. "We'll fix it."
My car is parked out front, stuffed to the roof with everything I own, which turns out to be surprisingly little when you subtract a boyfriend, an apartment, a friend group, and a life you thought was permanent. What I do have: three suitcases, a box of cookbooks, my grandmother's cast-iron skillet, and a truly irresponsible collection of power tools I bought from increasingly concerned hardware store employees on the drive across the country.
Bernadette — the circular saw — rides shotgun. She earned it.
The floorboards announce every step as I move through the first floor. The front parlor has good bones — high ceilings, original molding with acanthus leaves someone carved by hand a century ago. The plaster is cracked above the bay window, and there's a dark stain near the fireplace that I'm choosing to believe is water damage, because the alternative involves my imagination and I need to sleep here tonight.
The dining room is wallpaper carnage. Three different patterns layered like mismatched event linens, peeling back to reveal each other. The built-in china cabinet still has one of Margit's teacups on the middle shelf, alone, like the last guest at a party who doesn't know everyone else has left.
My throat goes tight.
"She loved you," I tell the teacup, and then I have to walk into the kitchen before I do something embarrassing, like cry in a dining room that smells like mouse droppings and regret.
The kitchen is enormous. This is the good news. The bad news is that enormous just means more square footage of problems — a commercial range that's either vintage or condemned, tile that might have been white in a former life, and a window over the sink that looks out onto what the listing described as "established gardens" and what I'd describe as "nature reclaiming its territory with enthusiasm."
The faucet drips when I test it. Water comes out brown, then rust-colored, then something approaching clear. Progress. I lean against the counter and pull out my phone for inventory photos, already composing the caption for Del: Surprise! Everything is terrible and I've never been happier.
Under a curl of peeling contact paper near the sink, a piece of lined paper. Torn from a cheap spiral notebook, handwriting all capitals — blocky and even, like someone took their time.
YOU DON'T BELONG HERE.
My hand stops mid-reach. For a breath, maybe two, my brain does the thing it always does — categorizes, contextualizes, defuses.
Kids. Has to be kids. The inn's been sitting empty for three years, and broken windows are basically engraved invitations to bored teenagers with spray paint and opinions. I'd already spotted the graffiti on the garden shed — a crude but anatomically ambitious drawing that suggests Halo City's youth have a future in the arts, if not the sciences.
The note goes in my back pocket. I take my inventory photos. I keep cataloguing.
The second floor has four guest suites and what Margit used as her private rooms at the end of the hall. Three are in various stages of beautiful decay — one has a ceiling medallion that makes me want to weep with its intricacy and a floor that makes me want to weep with its softness. My foot goes through a board near the bathroom threshold, and I extract my ankle with the poise of a woman who has never in her life put her foot through a floor.
"Rude," I say.
The fourth suite — overlooking the street — is livable. Margit must have kept this one up in the final years, because the mattress is only mildly suspicious, the wallpaper is intact,and the bathroom has a clawfoot tub with actual grout still connecting the tiles.
