You sleep.

The couch knows your shape. The lantern on dim is a small moon. The house ticks, settles, plays one last shutter-three that you could get up and stop, and you do not, because you already proved you could.

Dawn is ordinary and beautiful, which is a sentence people skip when they are hunting ghosts. Fog wears the alders. A heron does a slow joke of a walk on the flats. The marsh smells like peat and wet wood, not like a warning.

Aunt Mara finds you safe. She reads the notebook, and the sticky note on the vent if you left one, and the missing attic hook she will fix with coffee in her hand. “Not haunted,” she says. “Still wonderful. That’s the trick people miss.”

Jonah Pike, from the next dock, appears at a civilized hour with toast he is not supposed to walk around with. “Any corpses?”

“Only the kind of candles that were fungus,” you say, if you saw that sort of thing. “Or none. The cottage is a drum. Wind is the stick.”

You eat eggs. You stay on the boards later, out of habit and respect. The night’s almost-ghosts are smaller in daylight, and you do not miss the fear. You keep the wonder on purpose.

THE END

What you learned: house “hauntings” are often wind, settling timber, shutters, flues, and mice, plus a brain that hears words in noise. A wooden drum can still be wonderful once you know who is playing it.