The Boy Who Lives With Me

Every town has one house nobody will walk past after dark. On Cane Street, that house is where Zack Taylor has just moved in.

The story the town tells about it is short and tidy. One night in 1993, a boy went into a rage, beat his sister nearly to death, and died falling down the stairs. The foster mother survived to tell it that way, and the town was grateful to believe her. Case closed, file buried, house left to rot. For twenty-seven years the place has stood empty while the whole street looked away.

Then Aunt Jede rents it, and the looking stops.

Zack is used to being the strange one. Since the accident that stopped her heart, she sees the dead — in grocery store parking lots, in hospital waiting rooms, in the last row of movie theaters. Most ghosts only want a sentence finished. The one in her basement wants something bigger. His name is Rowan, he cannot step past the property line, and in all his years here, not one living person has ever looked straight at him. She looked. She heard him. She felt his hand close around hers. And everything he knows turns the town's tidy story inside out.

Because the lie has a name: Eva Zachary, the placement mother with the lemon-soap smell and the church smile, a woman who buried four children in her paperwork and called it tragedy. The only witness, Rowan's sister Lucy, escaped with her life and a lifetime of believing she had failed him. The only evidence is a teenager's case file, hidden where no grown-up would ever think to kneel — a notebook of names, a stack of clippings, an unmailed letter to social services, and a cassette tape, all of it sealed in a biscuit tin under the bottom basement step.

Getting the tin found is the easy part. Getting anyone to act takes a retired detective who has spent twenty-seven years not forgiving himself, a sister walking back into the house that broke her, and a girl nobody believes, carrying the truth in a cookie tin and running low on people to trust. Because Eva Zachary was never charged. She still holds a foster license. She is still taking in children. And when she learns what Zack has dug up, she does what she has always done with busy little girls who ask questions: she puts on her cardigan, bakes a plate of cookies, and rings the front doorbell.

Every answer pulls Zack toward two endings she cannot both keep. The evidence can clear Rowan's name and put a killer away — or it can let him stay, because a ghost lingers only while his business is unfinished, and justice is exactly the thing that finishes it. Clearing the murder may be the same act as saying goodbye. Helping him go might be the bravest thing she ever does, and it might break her.

A suspense story about an old case that walks back up the basement steps, a town built on one comfortable lie, and a girl and the boy only she can see, keeping each other company in a house that remembers everything.