Marguerite Holloway has been dead for two hundred years and she is very good at her job.

Seventeen families. That's how many she's driven from the house on Maple Street since Edward poisoned her with arsenic in 1823 and married her sister. Bleeding walls. Slamming doors. Whispers that crawl up the spine at three in the morning. She's refined her technique over two centuries, and her record is flawless.

Then Theo Castillo moves in.

Thirty-two years old. Horror novelist. Wearing a t-shirt that says SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL CEMETERY. When Marguerite bleeds the walls of the upstairs hallway, Theo pulls out a notebook and asks what color the blood is at different temperatures.

Theo talks to the empty rooms for a full week before Marguerite accidentally materializes. The first thing Theo says is: "You're beautiful."

No one has ever said that to Marguerite. Not Edward, who married her for her father's money. Not the seventeen families who fled screaming. Not the two centuries of silence between.

It's hard to haunt someone who leaves you books on the nightstand. Harder still when she reads aloud and asks if the Victorian dialogue in chapter nine sounds authentic. Hardest of all when the neighbor calls a self-important exorcist with a podcast, and Theo Castillo stands in the doorway and tells a man of God exactly where he can put his holy water.