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Leo stood in the dark beyond the flashlight’s reach. He was pale even for a ghost, his edges faint and uncertain against the shadows.

“I’m measuring,” Nate tried.

“Get away from there.”

Nate rose. “There’s something behind this wall.”

“No.”

“There is.”

“No, there isn’t.” Leo’s voice rose on the last word, and the pipe above Nate’s head gave a hard metallic knock.

“Okay, okay.” Nate held his hands up in surrender. Obviously he wasn’t going to make any headway while an upset ghost was guarding this place.

“You should not have come here. Did you think you could use that thing to distract me from my duty?”

“Your duty?”

“People can’t be down here!” As if to accompany Leo’s words, the old furnace shuddered in its housing, metal panels rattling hard enough to fill the room with noise.

“Okay,” Nate said again, moving away from the wall, unhurried, trying to project calm. “The foundation’s in good shape,” he said. “Did I mention that? Driest basement I’ve ever worked in. Whoever repointed this stone knew what they were doing.”

The furnace rattled once more and went still.

“The joists, too. A hundred and thirty years and not a sign of sag.”

Leo drifted closer, out of the dark and into the edge of the flashlight beam. He didn’t look at Nate. He looked at the wall, and then he placed himself in front of it, arms at his sides.

It was the exact spot where he’d stood during the tour. Blocking a door that wasn’t there.

Except now Nate knew there might have been one, at some point.

“I’m done down here,” he said. “For today.”

Leo’s gaze cut to him. “For today?”

“I’m not going to lie to you.”

Something in Leo’s outline steadied at that, solidifying. “You should go up,” Leo said.

“I’m going.” Nate clipped the tape measure back onto his belt. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped. “You coming?”

“I’ll stay here for a while.”

Nate wanted to argue with that, but in the end, he didn’t. If Leo wanted to stay down there, Nate couldn’t stop him. He used to think Leo was scared of the basement. But he wasn’t. He was scared of other people being down there.

Nate filed that thought away as he walked into the oddly bright kitchen.

His coffee sat where he’d left it, gone cold. Somewhere in the dining room, Marvin bumped patiently against a chair leg, over and over, waiting for someone to object.

No one did.

Nate stood at the counter and listened to the hum, and the bump, and the silence underneath the floor, and took out his notebook.

Hidden space, ~6 ft. Wall built from inside.

He looked at what he’d written. Then he added another sentence. What is Leo’s duty?