The Ones Who Stay
When Alex moves into an old house on the edge of a quiet town, it seems like a chance to disappear for a while. The rooms are empty. The neighbors keep their distance. The silence feels earned.
At first, nothing is wrong.
Then Alex notices the house responds to how it's used. Unoccupied rooms grow warm. Neglected spaces feel attentive. And when certain doors stay closed too long, children begin to appear-patient, observant, and disturbingly polite.
They don't threaten.
They don't follow.
They simply stay where Alex does not.
As the house subtly reorganizes itself around his routines, Alex learns there are rules to living there: attention keeps spaces neutral, neglect makes them available, and leaving-even briefly-costs more than it should. The children insist they are not trapped. The house insists on balance. And the longer Alex remains, the harder it becomes to remember what he once reached for beyond its walls.
The Ones Who Stay is a quiet, creeping novel about inhabited spaces, gradual erasure, and the terrible comfort of being needed by a place that does not want to be empty. It asks what it means to belong somewhere-and what it costs when a house decides you are exactly the shape it's been waiting for.
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