She can leave whenever she wants. The gate works. The road is real.

Four months into her year at Wychwood Manor, Kate Ellison has stopped cataloguing the rooms that rearrange themselves. She's stopped questioning the groceries that appear on Monday mornings— the coffee she never asked for that's exactly what she craves, the brie ripened to the edge of too-far. She's stopped wondering why the fire in the library is always lit when she walks in, or why the tree line is closer than it was last week.

Ames is still there. Still watching her face when she talks. Still asking what she's reading. Still touching her like she's the first interesting sentence he's found in centuries. He is beautiful and patient and inhuman and he has never once asked her to stay.

He doesn't need to.

Kate's best friend stops texting. Her phone dies and the house won't charge it. The rooms she documented have changed their wallpaper, their furniture, their century. She walks the stone wall at the property line and discovers it curves back to where she started. She drives for the gate and her body revolts before she reaches the road—the shaking, the nausea, the desperate animal need to turn the car around and go back inside.

The house is learning what she likes. The house is becoming what she needs. And Kate is becoming less—her skin thinning, her memories dissolving, her shadow growing pale beside a man whose shadow is getting darker every day.

She knows what's happening. She can see it in the mirror, in the mattress that barely remembers her weight, in the locked drawer that beats with a pulse that matches her own.

She stays anyway. Because no one has ever looked at her face.