The Whitmore house was different in the way that things were different when their internal structure had shifted without their external form having changed.
Same door. Same hallway. Same clock ticking in the same unhurried way it had ticked for decades, entirely indifferent to the events that had accumulated around it. The flowers Margaret had arranged last week were gone, replaced with nothing, the absence of them making the hallway look stripped down to its actual character, stone floor and pale walls and morning light from the window above the stairs.
It was six-fifteen.
Nobody was up yet, or if they were they had not come downstairs.
I set my bag at the foot of the stairs and stood in the hallway for a moment, recalibrating. The house felt held. Not hostile, not warm, just held, th
