Another of the service bells hung beside the bed. That was strange, Margot thought; the master bedroom of all places should have a cord to summon the staff, not a bell to be summoned. Maybe the rooms had different uses when the system was installed.

She took another step into the room. Her mirror self moved closer in response.

The bed had been stripped. Only the mattress remained, faded and uneven from age. Two indents, one on each side, marked the positions her parents had slept in most nights.

The prickling, stinging sensation in her throat was back. In a strange way, those indents made her parents feel far more real than the photographs had. This was a stamp they’d left on the world. The shape and size of them, forever formed into the mattress, a tangible memory built across thousands of nights.

Margot’s hands shook as she reached toward the mattress. It was old and likely at least a decade past needing to be replaced. The stitching had come loose in places, and the colors had faded into a murky gray blur. She touched it and felt a spongy kind of give.

The sheets and quilts, unsalvageable, would have been removed along with the bodies. The mattress had been left, though. Someone must have decided it was too good to throw out, but Margot doubted anyone would want to sleep on it after it had cradled two corpses. She couldn’t. Even if the house didn’t contain a single other bedroom, she would rather sleep on the sagging couches next to the wire effigy than in the room where her parents had died.

Some people believed that death stained a place. Margot didn’t like to think of herself as superstitious, even though superstitious behaviors had a way of creeping into her habits: the slight skip over cracked pavement, the wariness during full moons. She would laugh at herself every time she knocked on wood. But it was hard to deny the unnatural sense of stillness in her parents’ room.

Their heartbeats had thrummed through the space every night until they’d abruptly stopped. Their bodies had remained, waiting to be found by Kant that following morning, but their selves—their lives, their souls, their personalities and hopes and fears and most private thoughts—had faded into the ether during that night, sometime between two and four in the morning.

And it almost felt as though part of that essence was still there, suspended in the air, waiting to be breathed in.

“Who were you?” Margot’s voice came out as a whisper. She leaned closer to the bed, dropping her voice even further. “Did you know you were going to die that night? Would you have done anything differently if you had known?”

She glanced behind herself, paranoid that she was being watched. The bedroom door hung open, but the house was empty and still. Margot swallowed and carefully, gingerly climbed onto the mattress.