“Yeah, no shit, because you have no evidence this is the right place,” Tyler said.

“It is the right place. Grey was unhappy here,” Vivi said. “What she left behind is . . . ugly.”

“Ugh, the pair of you are as bad as your sister,” Tyler said as he strode ahead of us toward the building. “It’s always energy and demons and whatnot. Ridiculous!”

The Vasylyks had struggled to sell this flat. Cate had tried and failed to sell our family home after our father had died too. I thought it was probably because of the suicide, that people either found out about it or could feel the unsettling energy it left behind. But maybe . . . not. Maybe it was because of us. Maybe our strangeness had seeped into the walls and made the space feel haunted.

We buzzed the four flats in the building but all went unanswered. Eventually we slipped inside behind a man with a bag of groceries, then followed Grey’s trail to the door on the second floor. Vivi rattled the handle—locked—but the wood was old and thin, the door beginning to curl at the edges like a wet book. She only had to throw her weight against it once for it to pop open with a dry crunch. Then there we were, inside another of Grey’s apartments, with more questions than we’d ever have answers for.

There were a few pieces of furniture stacked in one corner of the living room, but apart from that, the space was empty. The carpet was creamy peach, pilled with age, the walls covered with sun-faded wallpaper. The kitchen was all wood, a fashion statement left over from the seventies. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, one bedroom. It was tiny, dark, grim. Grey had lived here with three other girls, all of them packed on top of each other like rats in a nest.

It didn’t feel welcoming. It felt watchful and dangerous in a way I couldn’t place. Shadows stretched long. A line of ants crawled up the wall in the bedroom, into a tiny pock hole of rot near the ceiling. I could feel why they’d had trouble selling or even renting it. It was haunted by our sister, by the sadness and worry she had left in the walls. She had not been Grey Hollow, supermodel, when she’d lived here; she had been a scared seventeen-year-old girl with no money and nowhere else to go.

“Well, this is grim,” Tyler said as he opened a window that looked directly onto a neighboring brick wall.

We performed what had become our usual routine. We ran our fingers over the baseboard, looking for hidden compartments. We opened all the kitchen cupboards and pulled out all the drawers. We searched under the bathroom sink, inside the cistern, in the creepy crawl space beneath the bathtub. We unscrewed the curtain rods to look for rolled-up scraps of paper and held the curtains up to the light to search for hidden embroidery. We turned over the few pieces of furniture and looked for words scratched into the wood.

I caught flashes of her life here, those first few months of freedom away from the burden of high school and two younger sisters. I pictured her coming home from bars, a little tipsy, giddy and grinning because a cute boy had asked for her number. I pictured her in the kitchen in her pajamas, cooking what she cooked for us every Sunday morning: waffles, scrambled eggs, freshly squeezed orange juice. I pictured the way the bedroom had looked when it had been partly hers, her bunk bed draped with all the trinkets and treasures she’d taken with her when she left home.

“There’s nothing left of her here,” Vivi said after blowing on all the windows to search for messages written in breath—and yet there was. There was the unsettling energy. Something malevolent, below the surface. I kept coming back to one wall in the bedroom, the wall Grey must have slept against, because I could feel her most strongly here. I trailed my hands over it. There was nothing outwardly strange about it. No bumps or lumps or hidden compartments. Nothing anomalous at all except the line of ants.

“You feel it too,” Vivi said as she came to stand next to me. We both stared at the wall. A tangled web of wrongness hummed beneath.

“The wallpaper here is slightly different,” I said. It had been bugging me since we arrived, but I’d only just put my finger on it.

“Is it?” Vivi said. She looked from one wall to the next and back again several times. “You’re right.”

“It’s newer.” I ran my hand over it again. Yes, it was smoother and less faded than the wallpaper in the rest of the apartment. “They papered over this wall, but only this one.”

Tyler was pacing behind us. “You two are supposed to be exonerating me, not critiquing hideous decor choices.”

“Well, we already busted down the front door,” Vivi said. “What’s a peeled wall after that?”

Vivi brought in a chair from the pile of furniture in the living room. I climbed up on it and started in the top right-hand corner where the ants were, fiddling with the paper until an edge came loose enough for me to pull. It was cheap, hastily applied. It came away from the wall in thick sheets, leaving tacky marks on the paint beneath.

“Ugh,” Tyler said, gagging as I let a sheet fall to the floor. “The wall is rotting.”

“It’s not rot,” Vivi said. We both leaned in to get a closer look. “It’s something else.”

Vivi placed her palm against the wall. It was spongy beneath her touch, steeped with moisture. With a little more pressure, her hand sank right through the sodden plaster. The smell exploded out of the dark, a foul, green stench.

“Oh, something’s dead,” Tyler said, dry heaving.

Vivi pulled away a chunk of wall, and then some more, big clops of it falling to the floor like mud. The plaster was gelatinous, barely even solid anymore. “No. Something’s alive,” she said as she held a piece of the wall up to me. It reeked—but one side of it was covered in little white flowers.

The same flowers that had been growing in Vivi. The same flowers Grey stitched in lace to her gowns.

“Carrion flowers,” Vivi said as she picked a bloom and twirled it in her fingertips. “The punkest thing I learned in high school science. They smell like rotting flesh to attract flies and bugs.”