The house was in Maine, and it had been in the family since 1923, and every August, for as long as anyone could remember, the family had gathered there for a week — cousins and aunts and uncles and the occasional family friend, all converging on the same house in the same week, sleeping in the same rooms, eating at the same table, doing the same things they had done every August for fifty years. Margaret, who was forty-one and who had been coming to the house since she was three, was the one who organized the reunion now, and the one who sent the emails in June and the reminders in July, and the one who arrived first each year to make sure the house was ready.

She arrived on a Tuesday, three days before the rest of the family, to find the house in perfect order — which was unusual, because she always arrived to find it dusty and slightly disheveled, with the windows closed and the air stale. This year the windows were open. The rooms smelled of lavender. The kitchen was stocked with basics she had not bought. The beds were made with linens she did not recognize. She walked through the house twice, checking every room, and nothing was out of place, and nothing was missing, and nothing was wrong, and she could not identify the specific quality of the wrongness that she felt, which was not a wrongness about the house but a wrongness about the feeling of the house, which was the feeling of a place that had been recently and thoroughly inhabited by someone who was not her and who had been there long enough to leave a mark.

She called her mother. Her mother said the house had been locked since last August, and that she had not been there, and that she did not know how the windows could be open or the beds made, and that Margaret should call the local police. Margaret called the local police. The police came and looked at the house and found no signs of forced entry and no evidence of trespassing and no reason to believe that anything illegal had occurred. They suggested that Margaret had simply forgotten that she had opened the windows and aired the house before leaving the previous August. Margaret had not forgotten. She had checked the house three times before leaving last August, and she had closed the windows and locked the doors and set the alarm, and she was certain of this, in the way that she was certain of very few things, because she was the kind of person who checked things, and who remembered what she checked, and who had been checking this house every August for thirty-eight years and who knew its rhythms the way she knew her own breathing.

The family arrived on Friday. There were nineteen of them, which was more than usual — Margaret had invited three additional cousins whom she had not seen in years, because she had recently found them through a genealogy website and because she had thought it would be nice, for once, to have a larger gathering. The additional cousins were a brother and sister named Thomas and Diana, and their mother, who was Margaret’s father’s cousin and who had been estranged from the family for thirty years, and whose name was Patricia, and who had not been to the house since she was a teenager and who stood in the doorway when she arrived and looked at the house for a long time before she came in, and who did not say anything when she came in, and who did not look at Margaret, and who went directly to the room that had been, when they were children, her room.

Patricia died on the third night. She died in her sleep, in the room that had been her room, and the cause of death was listed as heart failure, which was not unusual for a woman of her age, and which did not surprise anyone, and which was not, in itself, the thing that Margaret would think about for the rest of her life. The thing she thought about was the sound Patricia had made, in the days before she died — a sound that Margaret had heard through the wall of the room next to hers, late at night, when everyone else was asleep. It was not a crying sound. It was not a groaning sound. It was the sound of someone talking, in a language Margaret did not recognize, to someone Margaret could not see. And the sound stopped, on the night Patricia died, and Margaret lay awake and listened to the silence where the sound had been, and she understood — in the way that people understand things that they do not want to understand — that Patricia had not been talking to no one. She had been talking to the house. And the house had been listening. And the house had decided, after three days, that the conversation was over.