With the judge gone, and with the freedom of knowing I would not be thrown out, I prowled the house with a possessive aggression. Perhaps some in my position, having finally obtained a measure of stability after so many months of worry, would collapse into bed, or spend their time reading or painting or simply relaxing. But art had long been a performance for me, a way to convince the Frankensteins of my value. There was no one to convince now. Art brought me no joy, and my canvases were left blank.

I moved from room to room, pulled by an invisible, nagging thread. Things familiar—my four-poster bed, the leaded windowpanes, even my own paintings—had a layer of uncanny discomfort. I walked as if in a dream through a simulated version of life in which I was certain that if I just turned around quickly enough, I would find the truth of the dream: A wall melted to reveal the bones of the house, groaning and fracturing under the weight of us all. The ghosts of Madame Frankenstein and her long-lost second child, watching how well I kept her charge, even beyond the grave. The desiccated corpses of my own parents, too unknown to be anything to me but lifeless husks.

Yet no matter how many rooms I prowled, no matter how many times I spun, certain someone was watching me, there was never anything worth noticing.

The house was the same.

The people in it were the same.

Victor was coming home, and we would be the same.

What, then, had changed?

The estate felt lessened and cheap under my newly critical eye. Now that I did not have to fear losing this sitting room, I saw that the velvet sofa was all wrong, the dimensions of it too big for the space. It was furniture designed for a grander room. Rather than improving the space with its fineness, it emphasized how claustrophobic the room was, how low the ceiling, how bulky the fireplace.

Everywhere I looked was the same. Soulless paintings too big for the walls they hung on. A dining table set for twenty that only ever fed four. It was all boastful artifice hiding the truth:

The house was dying.

I saw it all now: The dusty corners. The cracked and fading paint. The doors that did not hang quite right, either never closing all the way or closing so tightly I feared being locked inside a room, unable to open them again. Half of the fireplaces were boarded up. The other half either heated the rooms to stifling oppression or did little to cut the ever-present draft. Any room that might ostensibly have visitors was stuffed with overtly ornate furniture, scrolling wood and gilt and velvet. And any room that would not was either empty or a graveyard of broken, useless items.