She thought of the photos: she’d been torn out of each one. Her childhood bedroom, cleared empty. They’d tried to scrub out every memory of her so thoroughly it was as if they’d never had a daughter to begin with.

But it hadn’t been enough. For all their efforts, they’d left traces. The child’s drawing, lost in the back of the wardrobe. The wisps of frizzy hair dancing in from the photos’ edges.

“The estate—and the curse—had always followed the bloodline, so they feared it would catch up to you eventually, no matter how well they tried to shield you. I guess they always imagined they had more time. To prepare. To figure things out. But then time ran out and no better plan had been made, and so you inherited the house.”

Grass, fluid in the wind, grazed across her skin. She stared at it instead of Kant.

“When we heard you were arriving for the funeral, Nora, Ray, Andrew, and I talked it over. Nora thought we should try to prevent you from getting to the house at all. That maybe you’d spent long enough away to escape the curse, as long as you didn’t get too close.” Kant shifted his weight, resting more heavily on the wooden bar. “I didn’t think that would work. The house remembers blood, Maria had said. Trying to keep you away from the building could only delay it, not prevent it. When you became unwell after visiting town, I knew the land had marked you as its owner.”

The headache was still there, mild but slightly harder to ignore now. Margot flexed her neck, as though she could blame stiff muscles for its existence.

“I can survive a headache,” she said. “I don’t think I can survive Gallows Hill.”

“Other people have said the same,” Kant noted. “Two in the time I’ve worked here. If we think someone might have stayed on the land too long—a seasonal worker who didn’t move on fast enough, say—we call them up after a couple of days, see how they’re doing. If they’re sick, we tell them to come back to the land. Sometimes they don’t want to. They think they’re only unwell with a cold that will pass. Or that we’re joking.”

Margot pulled her legs up, resting her knees under her chin. The cold, heavy dread was creeping back into her as Kant continued.

“We call back a week after. And then again a week after that. Usually, by the second call, we get a family member. The final call, that family member will tell us they’re not long back from a funeral.” He paused, letting the words hang, then added, “Two in my time. More in the generations before me. No one’s been able to escape it.”