Feeling ignored was even worse than feeling alone, so Hildy made plans to sell the house. The first five people who came to look at it were scared away before they even got through the front door. Hildy attempted to make the house somewhat less ghost-infested by selling some of the haunted furnishings back to their original owners. She wrote a letter to the man in Portugal asking if he’d be interested in taking back his wailing bureau. He replied straightaway. He didn’t want the bureau, he said, but hoped she was doing well. And he signed the letter like this: “Your friend, João.”

Hildy stared at the words for several minutes. Could she really call this man her friend? Or was he just being . . . friendly?

She wrote him back. She kept the tone of her letter light and breezy. She lied and told him she was doing fine, and asked how he was doing. She signed the letter like this: “Your friend, Hildy.”

João and Hildy exchanged a few more letters. They were short and simple, just casual pleasantries and observations about the weather. Hildy still wasn’t sure whether João actually considered her a friend or if he was just being polite. But then he closed a letter with this: “If you should ever find yourself in Coimbra, I would be honored if you paid me a visit.”

She booked a rail ticket to Portugal that very day, packed a trunk full of clothes that night, and early the next morning a carriage arrived to whisk her off to the train station.

“Good-bye, ghosts!” she called out cheerfully from the front door. “I’ll be back in a few weeks!”

The ghosts made no reply. She heard something shatter in the kitchen. Hildy shrugged and started toward the carriage.

It took a hot, dusty week of travel to reach João’s house in Coimbra. During the long journey she tried to armor herself against inevitable disappointment. Hildy and João got along fine in letters, but she knew that in person he probably wouldn’t like her, because no one did. She had to expect it or the pain of yet another rejection would surely crush her.

She arrived at his house, a spectral-looking mansion on a hill that seemed to watch her from cracked-window eyes. As Hildy walked toward its porch, a wave of black crows took off screaming from a dead oak in the front yard. She noticed a ghost swinging by a noose from the railing of the third-floor balcony, and waved to it. The ghost waved back, confused.

João answered the door and showed her inside. He was kind and gracious, and took Hildy’s dusty traveling coat from her and laid out saucers of cinnamon-flavored milk tea and cakes. João made pleasant small talk, asking about her journey, about how the weather had been along the way, and about how they served tea where she came from. But Hildy kept tripping over her answers and felt absolutely sure she was making a fool of herself, and the more she thought about how foolish she sounded, the more difficult she found it to say anything at all. Finally, after an especially awkward silence, João asked, “Have I done something to offend you?” and Hildy knew she’d ruined the best chance she ever had to make a real friend. To hide the tears she felt coming, she got up from the table and ran into the next room.