Luis couldn’t remember how the song ended.
Mara found him at the kitchen sink before anyone else came down, humming the same four notes and stopping in the same place. She thought at first he was trying not to wake people.
Then he made a sound of anger and turned off the tap.
“What is it?” she asked.
“My aunt used to sing it. When she cooked.”
He hummed again. Four notes. A breath where another should have been.
“I know there was more.”
Mara’s hand closed on the clean towel she had brought.
“You’ve forgotten it?”
He looked at her. “Don’t say it like you’ve just found another useful piece of evidence.”
She let go of the towel.
“I’m sorry.”
“She raised me for three years. I haven’t just misplaced a tune from the radio.”
He wiped his hands on his trousers, forgetting the towel in front of him. Mara stood aside so he could get out of the kitchen if he needed to.
Instead he sat at the table, where Carl’s inventory sheet had been pushed beneath a bag of newly soaking beans.
“I can tell you the ingredients. I can tell you which pot she used. I can’t hear her.”
He pressed his palms flat against the table.
The sounds of an ordinary morning began upstairs: a door, a washbasin tap, Emmett arguing with Sofia about wearing shoes. Someone had slept safely enough to be difficult. Mara wished she could reach that kind of relief herself.
“Was it there yesterday?” she asked.
Luis nodded. “I sang it to June. Last night.”
She remembered him saying he’d watch her while Mara helped Gideon clean the dishes. After the new guests settled, June had woken crying in Seven. Mara had heard the crying and then a quiet voice. She had let Luis handle it because she was so grateful not to be needed in two places at once.
“What happened?”
“She was frightened. I told her something ordinary. Something I thought I knew.”
He stopped himself before saying more. Mara waited.
“She took my hand. Then she slept.”
The kitchen door opened. Tessa came through with her tool bag and saw their faces.
“What’s happened?”
Luis did not answer immediately.
Mara told her about the song without making it sound like a complete case. Tessa sat opposite him. She held the old truck key between thumb and finger, turning it over.
“My first boss put this on the ring,” she said. “I kept saying I’d replace the van’s ignition. He said I’d never lose a key this big.”
“You remember him?” Mara asked.
“I remember the work. The key. The jobs where he shouted. His face is gone.”
Her voice had none of its usual sharpness. She looked at Luis rather than Mara.
“Yesterday I thought it was exhaustion. Nia made me wonder.”
They went to Eight together, taking care not to turn a frightened request into an invasion. Nia answered in her sweater. She had Natalie’s name on paper beside the bed, the photograph still open on her phone.
When she saw Luis’s face, she put a hand against the door frame.
“You too.”
“Something,” he said.
Tessa showed her the key. Nia listened, then looked toward Seven. June’s low threshold light was visible from where she stood.
“It’s her,” Nia said.
“We don’t know yet,” Mara replied.
Nia’s eyes filled. “Then tell me what you need to know. Don’t make the answer disappear because she’s a little girl.”
Mara could not defend herself with a procedure. She had been trying to hold the child’s face and the losses apart because putting them together frightened her more than either thing alone.
“Who has touched her?” Luis asked.
Nia looked at her own hands.
She remembered helping June step around the office table. The girl’s hand had felt cold, but wet feet and sleepless children felt cold. There had been no reason to treat a moment of ordinary help as dangerous.
Tessa remembered guiding June’s finger onto the warning light’s switch. Luis remembered last night.
Mara had touched her too, many times. She said that, and did not pretend the difference meant the other accounts were wrong.
“It may not happen every time,” Luis said. “Or we may not notice every missing thing. We need to stop contact while we work it out.”
“And she sleeps next door to us,” Nia said.
Tessa looked around Eight. Two beds. The suitcase. A desk that no longer belonged to anonymous travelers. She had helped make it habitable.
“We don’t put her on the road,” she said. “But we don’t leave this arrangement like it is.”
Before Mara left, Nia took a folded page from her suitcase.
It was a letter, written on cheap lined paper. She unfolded it with the same care Ruth used opening her medicine case. The greeting held Natalie’s name, familiar enough on the page that Mara wanted to believe reading it would repair everything.
“She wrote it before I moved,” Nia said. “Not a big occasion. She got bored on a train.”
Mara waited while Nia read a few lines silently. The crease crossed one sentence, and she smoothed it with her thumb.
“I know the joke is funny. I can see why. I don’t hear her making it.”
Tessa sat on the other bed. She had stopped turning the key over, holding it still now as if movement might wear the last remaining connection away.
Nia folded the letter again.
“You need a list?” she asked Luis.
“Only if you want to make one. Things you remember clearly. Things you’re uncertain about. We keep it with you.”
“Not in her book.”
“No.”
Mara nodded when Nia looked at her. She could ask people to tell her about danger. That did not make their private lives her inventory.
Nia found a pencil. The first line she wrote was NATALIE PARK IS MY SISTER. She stared at it, then crossed out IS and wrote MY SISTER’S NAME IS.
“That’s what I know today,” she said.
Mara did not correct it into something more hopeful.
On the next line Nia described the cake photograph. She wrote about the dress, the argument, the kitchen table with one leg shorter than the others. Each sentence came slowly, but she chose it herself.
“Tell June the puzzle book is hers,” she said without looking up. “I meant that. I didn’t mean everything else.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“And don’t make it sound like I forgive her because I let her keep a book.”
Mara nodded. “Those are different things.”
Nia kept writing. Tessa took a second sheet and began describing her first boss’s truck, leaving a space where his face should have been.
Luis did not take their pages. He went to the window and watched the court while the two women worked, giving them as much privacy as a shared room could hold.
Mara went to Seven alone first. Luis stayed with Nia while Tessa fetched Gideon from Two. The core group needed to know before people began exchanging different versions in the passage.
June was awake. She sat on the double bed with her hands inside her sleeves. She had not picked up the puzzle book.
“I heard,” she said.
Mara sat in the armchair rather than beside her.
“How much?”
“That it’s me.”
“People are missing things from their memories. We need to see if something happens when you touch them.”
The girl’s mouth trembled. Mara kept her own hands folded.
“Did anything happen last night when Luis was here?”
June nodded.
“Tell me.”
“He sang. I wanted to know the end.”
“Did you ask him?”
“I held his hand. I thought it would help.”
“Help who?”
She looked at Mara without an answer ready.
“I don’t know.”
The statement was not an escape. Mara could see the girl searching for words that did not exist for what she had felt.
“Did the hunger change?”
June nodded again, slowly.
“It got quieter.”
Mara felt the room narrow around her. She wanted to go back to yesterday’s private possibilities, to believe an old house carried voices and exhausted people forgot names. Those remained possible for individual things. They no longer explained all of it well enough to leave everybody in place.
“You have to tell Luis that,” she said.
“Will he hate me?”
“He gets to be hurt. We can’t make that go away for him.”
June drew her feet farther beneath her.
Mara asked if she could bring him in. The girl agreed, frightened but clear enough for Luis to hear her when he came. Gideon stopped at the open door, saying nothing. Tessa stood in the passage with the tool bag at her feet.
June described the hand, the hunger, the feeling of hearing more than the song. She did not name it taking. None of them supplied certainty she did not have.
Luis listened without reaching for her.
“I didn’t offer you that,” he said when she finished. “Singing to you wasn’t giving away the person who sang to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I believe you didn’t understand. It still happened.”
His voice shook. He looked away before she could watch it turn into tears.
Gideon touched the door frame, where the threshold thread held against anything uninvited from outside.
“We brought her in.”
“Yes,” Mara said.
“The doors won’t help with this.”
Nobody argued with him.
They moved the girl to Eleven that afternoon, after Tessa and Tariq straightened its warped door and checked the window corners. It had dry beds and distance from Eight. The repair did not solve the hunger, and Mara did not tell anyone it did.
June chose the bed nearest the wall. Mara took the second. A third usable place remained empty, kept free rather than offered to someone who did not understand the risk.
The room’s activation cost one recovered unit. Twenty-seven remained after last night’s renewals. At dusk they would need nine occupied ordinary rooms and reception, ten units before any extra demand.
Noah fitted a simple interior latch that June could open herself. The outside key stayed with Mara, but she showed the girl how to use the inside mechanism twice, then had her demonstrate it.
“I can come out?” June asked.
“With someone watching and no touching while we investigate. You can always open your own door. You can call if you want to move.”
“Even when you’re tired?”
Mara looked at the new empty bed.
“Even then. Someone else can answer too.”
Tessa made a nonmagical alarm from a shop bell and a taut cord, mounted clear of the opening so nobody could trip on it. It rang when the door moved. It identified no intention; a guest wanting water would ring it just as surely as someone slipping out.
June tried it. The clear little sound made her flinch.
“Too loud?” Tessa asked.
“No. Just new.”
Mara laid out what they could do now: no direct skin contact, supervised movement, a memory list for anyone who wanted to keep one, ordinary medical checks, and a room apart until they understood more. June agreed to each separately. None required calling herself harmless, grateful or cured.
Downstairs, Gideon waited by the food sheet.
“You’ve known she repeats things,” he said.
“I knew about the sentence. Not this.”
“Did you tell everyone?”
“Luis. I wrote it down.”
He looked toward the stairs. For once the missing word in his accusation was not difficult to hear.
“I thought I had time to ask without frightening people,” Mara said.
“We were the people.”
She did not try to soften what he meant.
“Tonight,” she said. “Everyone gets the evidence and what we’ve changed. Nobody’s medical details they don’t want shared, but no pretending there’s nothing to know.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I expected you would.”
He picked up the beans, now soaked and ready for cooking. “You expecting a lot from that girl doesn’t make it easier for her to say what she’s done.”
Mara watched him carry the bowl into the kitchen. He was not entirely right about what June knew. He was right about the burden of her hope.
She went upstairs with a tray that could be set down without touching anyone. June watched her place it on the small table inside Eleven.
“Did you write that I’m bad?” the girl asked.
“No. I wrote what happened, what we know, and what we’re going to try.”
“Do I still have a room?”
Mara looked at the charged threshold, the sound latch and the cord bell. A place inside, with risks neither of them could wish away.
“Yes,” she said. “You still have a room.”