This House Is Not Safe

Laurie Ann had always believed that certain places could hold memories the way people hold their breath. Sometimes tight, trembling, and waiting to be released. The farmhouse was one of those places. Even as a child, she had sensed it. She'd run through its narrow halls with her shoelaces untied and her hair in messy braids, always feeling something behind her, not threatening, exactly, but expectant. Like the house watched over her. Like it listened.

Her grandparents had laughed at her when she told them this, their wrinkled faces warm with a kind of knowing she couldn't yet understand. "Old houses talk, sweetheart," her grandmother used to say. "You just have to learn how to listen back."

Back then, Laurie Ann imagined the house whispered secrets about the island, or the trees, or the wind rolling off the water. She never imagined it whispered about her and her life. But she knew better now. She knew that old houses didn't whisper about the world outside, but whispered about the people who lived inside of them.

She never planned to live there alone in the large inherited farmhouse. But sometimes plans have a way of unraveling, silently and slowly, until one day you look back and realize the life you meant to build is nothing like the one you're standing in. Now searching for a roommate she believes that she has found the perfect one. But her new roommate has a secret, Laurie Ann has a secret and the house itself may hold the biggest secret of them all.