The House That Held Us

Etta Hale treated buildings the way other people treated people: with a quick, practical honesty that was supposed to save time. She had her instruments out before she bothered to look at the brass plaque nailed crookedly by the front steps. The laser level made a polite red line across Marlow House’s foyer; the transit hummed on its tripod like a patient beetle. On the corner a café emitted the smell of cardamom pastries and bitter coffee, and an old woman with flour on her sleeve handed Etta a paper bag as if an inspector were entitled to consolation food. "You look like you need it," she said. "These buns keep the ghosts off, or at least distract them." Etta grunted something that might have been gratitude and fixed her eyes on the molding.

The house looked ordinary from the street: a squat block of apartments with a flaking name stenciled over the doorway, a dozen mailboxes, potted ferns with a habit of dying in winter. Inside, the light felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with electricity; the plaster breathed at one seam and a radiator emitted a low complaining note when someone passed. Etta felt the same twitch she felt before an argument in engineering: annoyance that something she'd been trained to measure had the gall to refuse the rules. She clipped a strain gauge on a section of stair stringer and watched the readout settle like a stubborn animal.

Marco Reyes met her at the foot of the third flight, wiping grease from his palms. He still smelled like motor oil and burnt toast; his laugh was the kind that turned a bad joke into a community event. "You the one with the laser, or someone from the council?" he asked. He had volunteered to show her around because volunteering meant he got to be useful and because being useful distracted him from how the building had been acting.

Etta—engineer, forensic by title and intent—didn't smile much, but she let a corner of her mouth shift. "Engineer. Forensic, which is the polite way to say 'find fault and charge for it,'" she said. Marco tilted his head and made a face like he'd been offered lemon instead of dessert. "Don't be that way. We just want to know if we can keep the place. Or if it's going to eat the stairs."

He joked. She measured. The first round of numbers said nothing alarming. Floors were within tolerance, beams bore loads in predictable ways, bolts were generally intact despite rust. Etta logged everything into her tablet, the interface neat and borderline cheerful. Yet the transit kept twitching as she walked past: distances that had been recorded in the morning shifted by a few millimeters in the afternoon, as if the house were sarcastically correcting itself. She blamed thermal drift until a tenant, Lil Thorne, opened a door two apartments down and there was a different hallway visible through the doorway than the one her plan said should exist.

Lil looked at Etta as if she ought to be embarrassed on the house's behalf. "You engineers always take it personally," she said, wrapping her cardigan tighter against a breeze that smelled faintly of chalk and frying onions. "Like it's your ex."

Etta chuckled despite herself. The laugh was small and practical—an acknowledgement that the problem required measurement, not melodrama. She set two more gauges and adjusted the tripod. An honest engineer can show up, gather data, and hand the town a verdict. That verdict could be demolition, or reinforcement, or paperwork that made people ask awkward questions. She'd written both kinds. Tonight, she planned to leave the sensors running and hand the data to whoever managed such matters. She had no intention of staying.

The first night rearrangement changed that.