Even Kant, drained and gravel voiced, smiled. “Even a near-death experience couldn’t snuff out your curiosity, I suppose. Your parents talked for days, trying to come up with a way to keep you inside at night. They could lock you in your room, turn you into a prisoner in your own home, but they knew eventually they would slip up and you would find a way out. No matter how many locks and barriers they added to that house, nothing ever worked. It’s like…a ship made of rotten wood. You seal one leak and another one springs open. The dead ones will find a way in eventually.”

She believed him. Through the dog flap. Through the attic. Through a dozen other holes and forgotten windows I don’t even know about yet.

“It took a while, but they finally agreed that the only way to keep you safe—keep you alive—was to send you away. Maria’s family had always lived on the land, but Hugh’s mother had a house in another state. They didn’t tell her about the curse, but she still agreed to take you.”

“How did they know it would work?” Margot asked. “I’d lived my whole life there. I should have been trapped already.”

Kant sighed, the movement sagging his shoulders heavily. “I can’t answer that. There was a lot your parents never told me. I gather that the curse doesn’t impact children the way it does adults, though. Maria told me stories about going on holidays with friends when she was a child, so I suppose she had firsthand experience.”

“I remember starting at a new school after I moved in with my nana,” Margot said. “I remember meeting friends. Getting lost the first time I visited the shops. But I don’t remember a single thing from when I lived at Gallows Hill. Is that a part of the curse?”

“Perhaps. I can’t say for certain.”

She raised her good hand to press at the stiff muscles at the back of her neck. A slow, throbbing headache was starting there, feeding across the top of her skull. It was still fresh. Minor. Barely noticeable, so she pretended she didn’t notice it.

“They never spoke to me again,” Margot said. “I guess visiting was impossible. But…no letters. No phone calls. Not even on birthdays.”

“Every generation of Hull before them had grown up on the land and slowly been swallowed into the curse as they matured. Your parents had an idea. They thought that, if they could remove you from the house entirely while you were still a child, remove every single trace of you and never even speak your name, the house might forget about you. That you might be free from it. For a while.”