The baby monitor picked up a second heartbeat six weeks after Ro's daughter learned to sleep through the night, and Ro told herself it was interference.
Isla was two and a half and went through a phase of waking at 3AM to narrate things. Doggy. Cup. Fan go round. The pediatrician said it was language acquisition, the brain rehearsing its new toys. Ro would lie in bed listening through the monitor, smiling into the dark.
Then Isla started narrating things Ro couldn't see.
Lady sit.
Lady eat.
Lady put the— and then a sound that wasn't a word, more like the noise a mouth makes when it's copying something it doesn't understand.
"What lady, baby," Ro said one morning, very casual, pouring cereal.
"In my room lady." Isla held up her sippy cup. "She eat my breath."
Ro laughed. She called her mother. Her mother said they say things, they're little, they don't—
"She eat my breath," Ro said again, alone in the kitchen, quieter.
She set up a camera. Of course she did.
Six nights of nothing. On the seventh, at 3:08AM, Isla sat up and began narrating and Ro watched the feed from her own bed, duvet pulled up, watching.
The room was empty.
Isla said: Lady say hi.
Ro typed into the monitor app: Hi.
She didn't know why. She was tired. It was 3AM. The mind at 3AM is a different country with different laws.
Isla looked directly at the camera and said: She say she been here since before.
Before what, Ro typed.
Isla tilted her head the way children do when they're listening.
"Before you got the house," Isla said, in a voice that had too much patience in it for a two-year-old's mouth. "Before the last family. Before the one before." A breath. "She say she was here when it was just field. She say she'll be here when it's field again."
Ro sat up.
"Isla—"
"She say—" Isla stopped. Listened again. Her face went through something Ro didn't have a word for. "She say you already know that. She say you felt it when you moved in, a little bit, remember? That one second in the hallway?"
The duvet was in Ro's fists.
She remembered.
The hallway. Moving day. One step in and just for a second — not dread, nothing so clean as dread — more like the feeling of being resumed, like a book opened back up, like something that had been waiting so patiently had simply, without drama, picked her back up again.
She'd told herself it was excitement.
She'd been so happy to finally have a home.
