And then, one morning just weeks after Morgan’s eighth birthday, all was quiet. She didn’t hear the growl of the coffeemaker. Or the shuffling of Bern’s slippered feet across the kitchen floor. She didn’t hear the dreaded knocks on the door, or the whisper of a jacket sliding over the back of a chair.

The only sounds came from outside. Cars shushed past. A shovel scraped against a sidewalk. A dog’s metal tags tinkled. A shrill scream scared the birds from the power lines. An icicle fell from the gutter and splintered.

When the police came, they wrapped Morgan in a blue fleece blanket. They muttered words like “Jesus Christ” and “house of horrors.” They asked if she had family, to which Morgan shook her head.

Bern had been her only family. Her mother had run off years ago. She’d disappeared so effectively, in fact, that Morgan had begun to doubt her existence at all. All she had were vague memories and the Bart Simpson doll she’d given her before dropping her off at the house on Winslow Street, never to be seen or heard from again.

The investigation revealed that Bern had slipped and fallen on her way to the mailbox. Cracked her skull on the sidewalk. The cops told her not to look, but Morgan stole a glance out the window and saw Bern lying there. Her eyes looked frosted over, like a windshield in December. The blood had already frozen around her head.

After, Morgan’s homelife became a kaleidoscope of different families, different houses. She never stayed in any one place too long; her ways of staring for hours on end and arranging everything in perfect symmetrical formation, from Legos to books to knives in the cutlery drawer, had a tendency to scare people. Especially adults. The children seemed more or less intrigued, but as soon as they began to mimic her behavior, she was cast out like a package delivered to the wrong address. Return to sender.

That was how she ended up almost exactly where she started, in Black Harbor, no more than ten blocks from where she’d lived with Bern. Lynette and Bruce Mori were a childless couple who’d been on the list for over a decade. And so, one monochromatic Christmas morning, she appeared on their doorstep—the gift they’d always wanted, but made with broken parts.

The social worker said it was a clean start. But even then, Morgan knew better. She was like a memory card. You could do your damnedest to erase all the images on it, but they were all there underneath it all, waiting to be recovered.

She was small and uncivilized. When she eventually started school, only the faculty were wise to the fact that their first grader was ten years old. She got her driver’s license at twenty, and graduated at the age of twenty-two. She was careful not to make any friends through it all. Or perhaps it had been less effort on her part and more the natural aversion of her peers. We learn from a young age to stay away from things that look like they could hurt us.