Author's Statement

This story represents new territory for me in its use of present tense—a conscious departure from my usual past-tense narrative distance. Present tense creates an immediacy and claustrophobia that serves this particular haunting, pulling readers into Sarah's experience without the safety of retrospective narration. The compression of the short-chapter format also demanded a different approach to pacing: each chapter must be both complete and propulsive, a constraint that forced me to strip away my tendency toward digression and focus on the essential heartbeat of the tale. This is my attempt at visceral domesticity, at making a house not a metaphor but a character, breathing and alive and capable of love—a different kind of threshold than I usually write, one that leads not to other worlds but deeper into this one.