“Okay, not everything,” Harrison clarified. “But why you’d go in her room and look at her stuff and all that? It’s kind of like sitting in silence. Like in the tunnel. Once you do it for long enough, you can hear the noise you didn’t notice before. That’s what it was like being with her stuff too. Even being near it. When I was out last night trying to find where you hid all of it, I just stopped and listened. I could imagine where Marley would put it. I don’t want to say I heard her, but yeah, like I said, I get it.” He gave me a cautious half smile, raising the side of his face that was turned away from Aidy. “Earlier, I was up here by myself, looking around and thinking about her. Boom, the floorboard comes loose.”

My mouth wiggled, trying to decide if he got a smile back. My lips folded inward and spread anyway. He did understand, in his own way, and because of that, he found a piece of the real Marley no one ever knew about.

He found the end of the Adventure.

The four of us sat up in that room for a while, taking turns passing the letter back and forth, not saying anything. I think we were all imagining ourselves as Marley, trying to hear the world around us as she once had.

Eventually, Aidy put an end to it. “We have to finish Dad’s to-do list,” she whispered.

We left the haunted house and went back to our own, spending the rest of the afternoon ticking off items on my dad’s list, as uneventful as it was productive. Nick kept his letter in the back pocket of his jeans. Seeing it sticking out, a tiny triangle of our Marley meant just for him, filled me with hope.

Everything was something.

I’d been right all along.

My dad came home early. First, he inspected my lightly bruised face, accepting my half-truth about falling while outside; then, he inspected our house, most impressed at the sight of my bedroom carpet, marred only by the small cigarette mark Ruby had burned into it all those years ago.

Mom came home sometime after, trailing happy tears from top to bottom. A clean garage! My neat bedroom! Even my bruises did not deter her. She was so pleased, she invited Harrison and Nick to stay for dinner.