He heard her as soon as he got out of the car. There were two other babies in the house—Ali had recently given birth to twin girls—but his daughter’s cry was unmistakable. “Mum mum mum,” she wailed. “Mum mum mum mum mum.” Rob closed the car door and approached the old farmhouse where he and Casey had lived for the first two years of their marriage. She and Danny had bought the place a few months before he died, and living there had been difficult for Rob. He’d felt Danny’s presence everywhere, had seen him around every corner, opening up old wounds and allowing them to fester. It wasn’t healthy for him, or for his relationship with his wife, and he’d finally realized that if they wanted their marriage to work, they needed to move away from the memories and focus on the future instead of the past. So they’d built a new house, one without any ghosts, and sold this one to Casey’s nephew Billy and his wife, Alison. At the kitchen window, the curtains parted, then fell back into place.
