Shelly ducks out from under Grandma’s hand and steps into the house, shrugging off her coat. “I didn’t bring any ghosts home with me,” she says. “Not even a moth.”

“That’s not the point,” Grandma says. “Shelly, I don’t want you wandering around alone, especially after dark. It’s dangerous and you could get hurt.”

Shelly takes a hair tie from her pocket and pulls her hair back into a ponytail, so Grandma will stop looking at her all concerned, the way her mom used to look at them both when they got back from hunting ghosts together. Grandma isn’t her mother. “I just needed some fresh air.”

“Shelly, promise me you’re not going to go out alone again.”

Shelly looks at Grandma and thinks about how they’re not supposed to charge for ghosts and how Shelly’s supposed to be Grandma’s apprentice. How ghosts are supposed to be something they do together, but Grandma keeps leaving her behind. “Okay,” she lies. “I won’t.”

17

Shelly stops combing her hair, and in the slivers of time Grandma lets her be on her own, she looks for her mom. When she can’t find her, she seeks out the dead, and she collects more ghosts.

She walks around town and looks for the dead in dark corners and forgotten places. She snatches ghosts from alleyways and buildings and takes them home to hide in her room. She rescues them.

Shelly finds Diya outside the drugstore where her mother used to work when she goes there looking for her mom’s ghost. She’s a young woman with long, dark eyelashes framing snowy white eyes, the opposite of Joseph’s black ones. She’s distracted by something Shelly can’t see, only half-present in the world, but Shelly twines a snipped-off strand of hair around Diya’s wrist to stop her from wandering off.

“This place is getting packed,” Estelle says, when Shelly brings Diya home.

Diya floats from Shelly’s hair and immediately gravitates to the cat. “What a cute . . . This is nice,” she says. “How thoughtful of you to . . . I’ll enjoy this.”

“Oh great,” says Estelle. “She mumbles.”

Diya is nice, but she’s not fully grounded in the world, even with the strand of hair wrapped around her wrist. Not the perfect companion for Estelle. Not the person Shelly was hoping to find.

Shelly wanders the route her mother drove to work every morning—all residential streets to avoid traffic lights—and finds Gavin behind an old apartment building. He’s middle-aged and wearing an old-fashioned suit. He’s hovering beside the garbage looking forlorn. When Shelly catches his attention, he looks confused by the state of the world around him. “I went for a walk,” he says. “I could swear I was just in the park.”