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The ghost moved between Nate and the basement door.

“No.”

Nate raised an eyebrow, just slightly.

“There’s nothing down there,” the ghost said. “It’s a basement. It’s dark. You’ll hate it.”

“Noted.” Nate stepped around the ghost.

“Excuse me?” Sandra looked back at him.

“Nothing.” Nate followed her down the stairs. The stairs were steep and the single bulb at the bottom did almost nothing, but Nate ran his light along the foundation and found stone, repointed sometime in the last few decades, and a floor with no tide marks. No smell of damp. After the stained ceilings upstairs he’d braced for a swamp. As it turned out, though, the basement was the driest thing about the house.

The furnace, on the other hand, predated the moon landing.

He wrote furnace: replace, then swept the light across the rest of the space — and stopped.

The ghost was standing in the far corner, in front of a stretch of blank stone wall, as if he were trying to block a door.

There was no door.

Nate wrote, in small letters, basement: corner.

The ghost did not like that. “Stop writing.”

“Mm.”

“Stop — what is that, what does that say⁠—”

Nate closed the notebook.

The rest of the tour took forty minutes.

It went the way the whole house went: the good always came with the bad. Six bedrooms, all generous, but one came with a ceiling stain directly under the roof leak and plaster that crumbled at a touch. There was original woodwork in every room, but also electrical wiring that seemed just as old. One bathroom held a clawfoot tub that was probably worth more than Nate’s truck, but it sat on a floor that flexed underfoot.

The ghost narrated all of it.

“That window is original.” It was, and worth saving. “That stain is nothing.” It was a roof leak. “You don’t deserve this house.”

That one was probably true.

Except that ‘deserving’ had nothing to do with it.

By the time they finished their tour, Nate had several pages of notes and some numbers in his head that didn’t match up to anything good.

Sandra clasped her hands in the foyer. “So. What do we think?”

We. Like they were in this together.

“It’s a good house,” Nate said, because lying about that would’ve been pointless. “But the roof needs replacing and the wiring has to come out. We need a new furnace, a kitchen that doesn’t make you think you’re tripping… That’s a lot of work.”

“For someone with your skills⁠—”

“My skills aren’t free. Neither is my time.” He tapped the notebook against his palm. “The asking price is for a buyer who can’t tell the difference between charming and expensive. I can. The numbers don’t work.”

Sandra’s smile finally, finally dimmed. “The sellers feel the historic value justifies the asking price.”

“They may have to rethink that if no one’s buying.”