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My father holds my eye. “On who is haunting Windridge Hall.”

His gaze contains a warning, but I’m not one hundred percent sure what it means.

“Riiighht,” I say slowly. “And why are we doing that?”

“So we can make it stop,” Aspen says. “Maybe we can help them.”

“Help dead people? How is that possible?”

She pulls at a lock of hair, twirling the ends. “That part, I haven’t quite figured out yet, but isn’t it better to know than not?”

I exchange another look with my father. Is it a good idea to acknowledge them? I’m not so sure.

“There are some things we shouldn’t meddle with, Little Fox. Maybe it’s better that we just keep our heads down until the thaw.”

She presses her lips together and shakes her head. “I don’t know if I’ll make it until then without either losing my mind or dying of fright.”

“What if it makes them stronger? If acknowledging them gives them power?”

She gives a wry laugh. “You sound like your father.”

It’s a fair point. I’ve lived at Windridge Hall since I was a teenager, and those were the rules our father gave us. Do not acknowledge what’s happening. Reach out to a real person. Carry on as normal.

Obviously, as we got older, the ‘reaching out to a real person’ part got physical and we needed a woman here, but the rest has always seen us well until the days got longer and the sun grew warm enough to melt the snow. Then everything went back to normal, or as normal as it ever is here at Windridge Hall with the three of us living here.

Four of us now.

Aspen isn’t going anywhere.

I study her, her long lashes, her freckle spattered skin. The waves of her long red hair, and the elegance of her neck. I’d never imagined myself as a one-woman man, but now she’s in my life, I can’t picture ever being interested in anyone else. She has made us a family.

I drop to my knees beside her. “What else can we find?”

She gives me a grateful smile, and I put my arm around her shoulders and kiss her head, just above her ear. I inhale the scent of her shampoo and imprint it to memory.

I wonder if she’s thinking about what Dov and I did with her last night. It’s something I’m going to replay in my memory over and over, and I hope we’ll get a repeat performance sooner rather than later.

She’s so fucking perfect for us.

I don’t want either this place, or my father, to chase her away.

She pushes a photograph into my hands.

“I’m pretty sure the woman I saw on the road was the eldest sister, Evelyn, and I think the one I saw last night was the youngest, Annie. They were older than in the photograph when I saw them, which is why I didn’t recognize them right away.”

“The one you saw last night?” I question.

“Yes.”

She fills me in on the details, leaving me with my jaw hanging. “Jesus, that must have been terrifying.”

“It was,” she agrees, “but actually, now I have a name and I know who she was, it feels less scary. I don’t mean so much less scary that I’m happy to live with it… or them… but that I can maybe get my head around it.”

Her getting her head around it is good. It means she might stay. Not that she can leave right now anyway, but it’ll be the new year soon, and then we’ll be into the home stretch. Sometimes we get an early thaw—a false spring—before it gets cold again, and she’ll be able to take that opportunity to leave and get the hell away from us and this place. None of us want that.

She points at the youngest man in the photograph. “I’m sure this is one of the men I saw standing beside Annie as she was hanging. It’s her brother, Clyde. He looked older last night, too. He had a beard.” She touched her chin as though to demonstrate. “But yes, I’m sure it’s him. I don’t know who the other man was, though.”

I think of something. “Where’s the hatbox that had all those tree ornaments?”