Revil had decided weeks ago that the people of the white house would die. No one had sent her. No one had asked. She had watched them through their tall windows, counted their habits, and chosen them the way a hawk chooses a field. Tonight the house sat empty, and she drifted through its rooms like a held breath. The hunger she carried had a shape now. It pressed against her ribs even though she had no ribs left to press. She was crossing the upstairs hall when the lantern in the far window flared. A pair of red points caught in the glass — her own eyes, reflected back at her, burning. Headlights swung across the yard below. A van turned up the drive. If anyone outside looked up now, they would see two coals floating in an empty house. They would name the thing they saw. Revil pulled herself away from the window and sank through the floor. She slipped out the back wall and crossed the yard to the old red barn. The barn was safer. No one had been inside it in years. She passed through the double doors and into a long row of empty stalls, the wood gray and split, the air thick with dust and old straw. She settled into the dark between two stalls and watched the house through a gap in the planks. The van door opened. A woman climbed out with a tool belt at her hip and a duffel over her shoulder. Blonde hair, work gloves, boots scuffed at the toes. She stood in the drive a moment and looked up at the house the way a person looks at a debt. Then she carried her bag to the porch, unlocked the front door, and went inside. A light came on in the kitchen. Another in the hall. Claire Beamen had arrived. Revil studied her through the kitchen window. The woman moved like someone who had been alone with a problem for too long — checking corners, testing a floorboard with her heel, talking to herself in short, flat sentences Revil could not hear. Good. A frightened thing was easier to break. Revil did not want Claire to die quickly. She wanted Claire to know, first, that the house had been waiting. She wanted the fear to grow in Claire the way the hunger had grown in her. Slowly. Cleanly. Until there was nothing else left in either of them. Revil drew back from the gap in the planks and let the dark of the barn close over her. She would start tonight. Something small. A sound in the wall. A cold spot at the foot of the stairs. Enough to make Claire stop and listen. The lantern in the upstairs window had nearly cost her everything. It had also given her a gift — a tenant, alone, in a house Revil already knew by heart.