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And then, while Nate-on-screen crouched under the sink saying this is why we check, folks, the seal rocked twice, gathered itself, and lunged.

And then the recording stopped.

Nate watched the lunge again.

Then he laughed.

This was too ridiculous.

Leo had tried to be sneaky. All morning he’d tried to cross the counter, hiding every time Nate turned around — and it had never once occurred to the little idiot that the camera didn’t turn around. He’d hidden from Nate and given the lens the entire show.

So what had he been after?

Nate scrubbed across the morning and watched the seal’s course. It moved in a straight line from the far end of the counter to the paint cans.

To the phone.

He’d been going for the camera.

Who are you talking to? What channel? Show me. So that was what breakfast had been about. Nate had explained his entire business model to a hostile ghost, and the ghost had said by all means, work, and spent the morning dragging himself across the counter to sabotage him.

Half an inch at a time.

Nate rubbed his jaw and made himself stop smiling.

He’d met many stubborn ghosts, but never one this stubborn.

The footage was the problem now. Take two he could trim before the seal arrived. Take three had a better angle anyway. Take four was the trouble: the cabinet pull only existed in take four, the light had been right, the door had come off in one satisfying piece — and there was a seal sitting in the foreground through all of it.

He cropped the shot, zoomed in tight, lost the front edge of the counter, reframed around the cabinets. He played it back twice at full speed. It read fine. A little tight. Nobody would notice.

He watched the final cut once through at double speed. Cabinets, ceiling, sink board, outro. A normal renovation video. No ghost. No seal.

Good enough.

He hit upload and closed the laptop.

Was Leo still on the counter? Probably yes.

Nate took the laptop with him and turned on the kitchen light.

The seal froze mid-movement, tipped forward at a desperate angle, tail in the air.

“Evening,” Nate said.

Slowly, very slowly, the seal settled back onto its belly.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” Leo said.

“You were practicing.”

Nate pulled out a chair, sat down across from the counter, and opened the laptop. He turned the screen toward the seal, paused on a shot of take four. The phone showed a fat gray shape in the foreground, smiling into the lens.

Silence.

“It’s my house, I can go wherever I want,” Leo said.

“You mean you can wobble wherever you want?”