Wishes come true

The dust in Gorsewick Hall has a texture you've come to know — greasy, patient, like it's been rehearsing for the crew's arrival for forty years. You wipe another fold of it from the banister and your clipboard records a number, and nobody looks up. That's the arrangement: Janice Perell does the small rooms, and everyone else does everything else. It suits you. Out of the way is where you live.

It's in the smallest room, behind a loose panel in the linen closet, that your rag finds metal. A ring — heavy, unmarked, warm in a way the house is not. You slide it onto your thumb meaning to bag it for the archivist, and the dust in the room seems to lean toward you, the way a crowd leans toward a stage.

You look at your hand. For a moment you could swear the hand is thinner than it was, the fingers longer, and there is a half-second — gone before you can hold it — where you remember wearing this ring before. Not finding it. Wearing it. In a house where the ring belongs to you.