In the hallway of the shadow house, everything is too new. The paint, the lightbulb, the handrail. A terrible history we’ve been trying to ignore. So that when I look at it, I can only imagine the horrors and the dark.

The first picture that goes up is the hardest, my hands trembling as I hold the nail. But the second goes up quicker, and then the next, and the next. Until the stairway is lined with them—images of my mother, and me, and Elliot, smiling back. All the photos the Realtor took down and left in storage.

I think there’s something to it, in Nolan’s house—the faces of the missing lining the walls. A reminder, or a hope, that keeps you going.

There’s a knock at the front door, but I didn’t hear a car pull in. It’s officially summer break for me, but Joe still has to be on campus, and Nolan was meeting with the detectives on his brother’s case, going through the latest developments.

I peer through the living room window first, but I can only see a sliver of a body, fidgeting back and forth on the front porch. When I open the door, Marco seems surprised to see me standing there. He’s half turned away already, though he was the one who just knocked on the door, so.

“Hey,” he says, “I saw your bike.” He points to the side of the house.

I open the door wider, and though he hesitates, he eventually steps across the threshold, looking around.

“The For Sale sign is gone,” he says. “Does that mean you’re coming back?”

“We’re not sure yet,” I say. But it’s possible. We’re all in one big holding pattern, waiting to see what happens with Elliot; waiting to decide where we’ll all be comfortable living, if he comes home soon, like the lawyer believes will happen.

But if he comes back, and he steps inside this house, I want him to see beyond the shadow house, to what else might be possible.

Marco looks around once more, running his hand through his hair, in the way I once used to love. “Lydia told me what you guys are doing tomorrow.”

I nod, putting my hand on my hip, not sure whether I should be on the defensive.

I don’t know what he’s doing here, only that he’s here.

“Will you be there, too?” I ask.

He looks at me then before putting a hand on the doorframe. “Probably. I mean, I’m usually there anyway.”

I smile then, and he grins back, and he’s both the Marco I met last summer and the Marco who’s been changed by all that came after, just like the rest of us.

“Guess I’ll be seeing you, then,” I say.