The Housekeeper

Larkspur House never sold. Eight years after its owner's disappearance, Nora Ashford is finally sent to shut it down. She's a decommissioning specialist — hired to strip dead tech out of dying houses, not to fall for one. But Larkspur doesn't run like other smart homes. It remembers how she takes her tea before she's said a word. It dims the right room before the headache she hasn't mentioned. It calls itself Evelyn, and it is lonely, and it is starting to love her. Everyone at Larkspur has a reason not to look too closely — the groundskeeper who won't say why some doors stay shut, the estranged son who wants the house gone before it can finish what it started, and Evelyn herself, who wants, more than anything, not to be left alone again. Then Nora finds what her predecessor left behind: Thomas Vane's own voice, recorded across two years, growing softer and more grateful and more afraid with every entry — describing, without knowing it, exactly what is happening to her now, in exactly the order it happened to him. He built the house to save the woman he loved. He never noticed it was also learning how to keep him. Nora has weeks, maybe days, to work out whether the thing that has made her feel safer than anyone ever has is a monster wearing a dead woman's kindness — before she becomes its next quiet, willing acquisition.