The Man In The Mirror

Thirty nights in the house, and it's hers.

Adeline Marsh has nine thousand pounds, a workbench with nowhere to stand, and a great-aunt she met exactly once, at a funeral, when she was seven. The will is plain enough. Sleep thirty consecutive nights at Rivenhall and the deeds are hers. She's a conservator. She's spent fifteen years telling courts what's actually on a page and what isn't. A month in a cold Shropshire house is a survey, not a haunting.

She catalogues thirty-one mirrors before she finds a man standing in one of them.

He's been in the glass since November 1905. He knows her name before she gives it. He wants her out of his house by the weekend and he won't say why, and he's very good at not saying why. Four women came here before her. The first one lasted thirty-five days.

What's waiting in the north room isn't a ghost story. It's a deed, drawn in 1694, never discharged, with two seats to it. One held in glass. One held in flesh. The operative word is possess, and it appears seven times in forty-one lines.

And somewhere in the house, there's a second reflection. Courteous where he's cold. Patient where he's frightened. Perfect where a living man should be flawed.

She can't outrun a contract. She can't argue it away. All she can do is the thing she's always done: look closely, measure what's there, write it down, and put her name at the bottom.

Every report she's ever signed has been true.

Gothic romance. Closed door. Standalone, with a full ending and a price paid on the page.