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I sat in bed the next morning still staring at his picture, wondering if this had once been his room. What had it been like then? Did he manage the house? Did someone else?

Somewhere below, a door softly closed.

I sat up, heart in my throat. I strained to listen, quieting my breaths until it was me and my heart and this ancient castle pressing in against me.

I knew I hadn’t been dreaming yesterday.

Something—someone—had bumped into the rolling ladder.

They’d partially closed the study door like they wanted to keep me out.

All the more reason to go in.

I climbed from bed, changing out of my pajamas and into a pair of jeans and a sweater. The gnawing hunger in my stomach would have to wait a little while longer. I slipped the portrait into my back pocket and crept down the steps.

All was quiet through the main sitting room. The other bedrooms were still, dust motes floating between weak rays of sun. The study door was closed when I came to it. On the other side, I thought I heard footsteps pacing in circles. Quietly, slowly, I turned the handle. I pushed the door open, heart a kick drum against my ribs, and craned my head inside.

Emptiness greeted me.

The journal on the desk was open, pages waving on an unseen breeze.

The portrait in my back pocket blazed against the fabric of my jeans. I ignored it, cautiously stepping inside the room.

I was open to the possibility of ghosts. All of the supernatural, really. There were too many unexplained stories and incidents over the years. I believed that there was something greater than me in the world. I believed in magic and faeries. I believed in the impossible. The trade of being a writer, I thought. I was built out of daydreams and longings, of all the unexplained energy in the world.

My job was to name it, capture it, get it down on paper.

To share that world with everyone else.

Ghosts, apparently, included.

A hum of something brushed against me and the hair on the back of my neck rose.

“Hello?” I called. “I’m not here to hurt you, I promise.”

It was only me and the harsh sound of my breathing in the room. I closed the door behind me.

“Really, I come in peace. I just want to write a book and get my agent off my back.” The papers stilled, falling to either side of the spine.

Maybe I’d scared him off.

“Yeah,” I huffed. “I guess I’m not very good company, am I?”

Wind rattled the glass in the panes, but nothing else moved around me.

I found myself almost disappointed by it.

Two months loomed ahead of me, endless and full of quiet. It might have been nice to have someone here. Even if it was an ancient spirit who did not want me in their study. At least it would have been company.

“I don’t blame you,” I continued. “Everyone usually leaves at some point. I should be used to it by now.”

The words were bitter, laced in a sadness I never let myself feel.

Writing became my life. My sole reason for existence. When I was in the trenches, hunched over my laptop through the early hours of the morning, nothing else mattered. Not the phone calls. Not the stacks of empty dishes or still-full mugs of tea by my elbow. It was me and the story—nothing else.

Which meant that phone calls and texts from friends went too long without being answered. It meant that I was a ghost on dates, barely present, too focused on where I’d left off in my manuscript and what I needed to add when I got back home. I was thinking about the corrections in my inbox, the cover designs and proofs. The tour dates. The slow slip down the best seller’s list into obscurity.

That same, familiar panic I thought I’d left in New York returned, slithering up my arms and hooking deep into my veins. Maybe I’d struck gold twice and it was all I was capable of. Maybe there were no more stories inside me, no more worlds or words meant to sweep me and my readers away.