Elise didn’t sleep well that night. The house was too quiet in the wrong ways and too loud in others, groaning with every shift of its frame, whispering drafts down the hallway. She’d forgotten how it felt to sleep with so much emptiness around her.
Even the bed creaked like it was sighing under the weight of memory. She pulled the covers tighter and stared at the ceiling until morning. The next day, she made a list: fix the roof, replace the boiler, clear out the downstairs pantry where the mice probably still held court.