Alva had known he wasn’t there within the first three rooms, though she’d told herself not to be fanciful. The house was different when he was in it, lighter. That made sense; who wouldn’t prefer Sam to her? Even the ghost liked him.

But when it was just her—she squeaked as a rat scuttled across the study floor and into the cobwebbed fireplace. A particularly elaborate pair of andirons watched it run: two iron dragons, their tongues pulled gruesomely out of their heads to bear a chain between them. The shadows stretched and waited for her, their damp, velvety depths promising hideous secrets.

She made herself walk through every room, even navigating the shaky stairs to the second floor she’d only seen once before, with the estate agent. The house hadn’t been this … moody then, merely ugly, dusty, and falling apart. Waiting for her? Luring her in? What exactly could this ghost do, anyway?

The ghost (or ghosts; Sam would want her to remember that) didn’t seem very important just then, though. If it was trying to scare her, it wasn’t working, because … well, because Sam was gone and that was much worse than shadows being wetter than they ought to. He wasn’t in the summerhouse. He wasn’t in the ramshackle old gardener’s cottage. He wasn’t in the gardens.

Of course he’d left. It was a good decision. She couldn’t give him what he wanted. What he deserved.

As she entered the room he’d made into his lab, facing out grimy windows to the brown rush of the Hudson, she realized she hadn’t actually thought he would leave. That had only been the fictional worst-case scenario, the kind of thought that haunted you even while you didn’t believe it.

His equipment stood cold and abandoned in the room. Which of these machines had he designed? Which had he made with his own two hands?

She tried to tell herself it was all for the best, but that was so manifestly false she wasn’t able to get very far with the idea. It was all for the worst, and that was obvious. She’d followed a stupid impulse, and now she’d been left behind, with only an empty haunted house to console her.

Next she tried to convince herself the only reason her stomach hurt was because she was worried about Liefdehuis and Alfred and the book, but even that wasn’t very successful. So she compromised: she was sad she wouldn’t see Sam again, because she liked him. She didn’t need him as a lover or—god forbid—a husband, but he had been her friend, just for a little while. It was all right to miss friends. She missed her friends in Montmartre, too.