By the time the alarm goes off in the morning, I haven’t slept at all. I hear my dad leave for work in the morning, before dawn. By then, it’s too late to try anymore.

“I don’t feel good,” I tell my mother in the morning, in the kitchen, as she’s draining the last of the orange juice from her cup. I don’t even have to fake it. My stomach churns, and I catch sight of my reflection—pale in the window.

She places a hand to my forehead. “Do you want me to make a doctor’s appointment?”

I shake my head. “Feels like the stomach bug,” I say. Feels like betrayal. Like lies. Like disorientation.

She looks from me to the clock, as if she’s debating staying home with me as well. I hold my breath until she swings her purse over her shoulder and grabs her keys. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

I nod, and she pauses at the doorway, as if she senses something. But in the end, she doesn’t press, and she waves once, shutting the door behind her.

Immediately, I lock the door. There’s a piece Caleb left for me. A memory he shared. The house he grew up in. If I had the address, I could check back through the public records, to see who owned it when he was younger. I can barely remember the town name. I have to pull up the map program, trying to remember where Max’s game was—but the names all blend together. I remember there was a toll. We veered off course. I think I could find it if I retraced our route, imagining Caleb beside me as we drove.

I take a shower to wake up, then pull together the directions and head to my car.

I’m halfway down the driveway when I see Max, walking up the path. He freezes, midstride. “You weren’t at school,” he says.

He showed up, like I did for him. My eyes shift down the road, making sure I don’t see Eve watching.

He eyes my bag, the keys in my hand. “Where are you going?” he asks.

“To find the house where Caleb grew up. He took me to it, once. On the way to one of your games. There was some sort of accident there, a fire or something. But I figure if I can get the address, I can get the names, and then some answers.”

He stands farther away, an adequate distance to keep. His words travel the expanse between us. “Want some company?” he asks.

“I could use some help with the directions,” I say. “I don’t know exactly where I’m going.”

“Which game was it?” he asks.

“Playoffs. The other team wore black. You won by one run. You beat the throw to home.”

He raises an eyebrow, and I remember our last conversation about baseball, on the subway, where I told him I didn’t pay attention anymore. Except I obviously was.

“I remember,” he says with a grin. “I know the way.”

We drive down the same highway, and I start rummaging through my purse. I have the coins out just as Max sees the sign for the toll and says, “Crap, toll.”

I can’t help the smile, the echo of the moment. I hold my hand out to him with exact change. “I remember this part,” I say. But that’s the last thing I remember well. I remember we veered off at a diamond-shaped sign, and Max and I take a few wrong turns before looping back to the exit and trying again, on a different route. “There,” I say as we pass the cornfield, the thickening forest. “Take a right.”

Then I’m directing by gut, by my memory of the landscape, how it led to someplace less occupied, abandoned, forgotten. There’s the dirt road, I’m sure of it. I direct Max to turn, and then I see it: a little sharper than the last time.

The eave hanging off the porch. The singed steps, splintered edges. The grass that looked scorched from the sun, or more. Boarded-up windows and an overgrown driveway, with no mailbox to designate the address.

I walk as if in a dream into the house. The numbers are gone, once nailed into the post beside the door. But the shadow remains, whiter than all the rest, aged with time. 734. I have the start of an address. Max opens the map program and reads off the street name. “Briar Rock Road,” he says, and it feels so fitting, as if the road name came after the house, and all that happened here.

Then I push at the door and stand in the same spot I stood with Caleb, months earlier. But now I’m someone new, and I am propelled toward the steps to the second floor.

“Jessa,” Max calls from the entrance.

“Caleb went up here,” I say. “I didn’t. But I have to see.”

The steps creak and sag under my weight, and I’m not sure whether they’ll hold me. I keep my hands planted against the walls, covered in what remains of a floral wallpaper, which is starting to give way, with the elements. But eventually I make it to the top. The dark hall with missing doors and half a wall burned straight through.

There are two rooms at the top of the stairs, one on each end. And a bathroom to share in the middle, straight ahead. There’s water damage everywhere, on top of the fire damage. The hall is dark.

In the first room, there are remnants of furniture, burned, soaked, ruined. The frame of a bed. A beat-up dresser. In the room across the hall, I can tell the walls had once been blue in sections, peeking through the charred remains. There’s the skeletal frame of a rocking horse, the skeletal frame of a child’s bed.

I imagine Caleb standing in this very same spot, looking inside. I wonder what he saw. What he understood, that I am struggling to see. I feel, suddenly, a person behind me. “Oh,” Max says. “Wow. This place has been eviscerated.”

“Mm,” I say. What was Caleb looking at? What was he looking for? I scan the room again, trying to see it through his eyes. He told me he didn’t know what happened here. He told me his father was dead. Lies and more lies.

And yet, he brought me here. It’s a tipping of scales that makes no sense. Letting me in, keeping me back.

“Did you hear that?” Max asks.

I didn’t. And then. A footstep, on the steps of the porch. Another.

I almost say it, the word already in my throat, pushing through: Caleb.

Only it’s not Caleb. I know the same way I know the tread of his step, the stride of his run, that this is not him. This is not him.

I hold my breath, and Max does the same. The footsteps disappear, and still we hold our breath. Faintly, I hear the background noise of an engine, idling at first, then driving away. And then I’m running down the steps, after the sound of the engine, as if I can catch a ghost.

I’m halfway down the drive when Max catches up with me. “Did you see?” he asks, breathing heavily.

I shake my head, staring off down the road. “Someone was here,” I whisper. “I told you, I think Eve’s been watching me.”

“I didn’t see anyone following us.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“She didn’t see us leave, Jessa. I don’t think it was her.”

But the thought lingers. I don’t understand what she’s after, with me. Why she was keeping notes, watching where I go, who I was talking to. Checking up on Hailey. And why she doesn’t need them anymore.

I remember the first day I showed up, when she asked to see my phone, to see who I’d been texting.

As if she wanted to catch me at something. Only I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’ve done.

We walk back to our car, the morning seeming eerily quiet. I’m used to living close enough to the shore that occasionally we can hear the gulls in the distance, crying. Here, there’s nothing. With the cold, there’s no insect noise, no bird noise. Just the wind moving the leaves, the branches swaying, the world faintly sighing. We wait, with the engine running, to see if anyone comes back. Eventually, Max puts the car in drive, and we leave.

But in an unspoken agreement, we stick to the back roads. I check the mirrors, constantly. There’s nothing. There’s no one.

“It could’ve been any car, really,” Max says. “Someone who took a wrong turn down a dead-end road or something. It could’ve been an animal, around the house.”

“Right,” I say. But we both believe there’s something more. It’s the unsettling, growing and gnawing.

It’s the feeling that we might not like what we find, and that maybe we’re not the only ones looking.