OF COURSE, Meg’s wasn’t the only haunted house in the city that never rests. There was a house I once knew well, on Holland Avenue. If you could wrench off the front and peer in at the resulting dollhouse, you would see the stacked stories.

People would pay anything in New York, even in Meg’s corner of what she called Prospect Heights but that the couple who had bought the two-bedroom downstairs—the white horsemen of the apocalypse, as Meg thought of them—called “North North Park Slope” (“No-No-Slo,” she mocked them to James over brunch). Particularly since Meg’s apartment, though

She was a living, breathing missed connection.

Above all, Meg wanted the map of her life to be intentionally plotted, a course charted by her and her alone.

Her younger brother James, on the other hand, owned a beagle that took Prozac, which was all anyone needed to know about that.

But today something is different, as if her interior mope has transformed into weather.

She knew that he himself lived in hoity-toity Park Slope, with all the rich white people and their SUV-strollers, and that this was his only rental property, and that he tried to do a good job—when he stopped by, he brought treats for her four-year-old, and spoke to him respectfully, as if he were indeed a tiny man—but she also knew that there was

So she was happy—or content, that was grown-up for “happy,” wasn’t it?—to spend her days there, usually alone, often in silence.

It was here, in her second-floor sanctuary, in a rather ordinary-looking eight-flat on a street lined with nearly identical buildings, in this unassuming pocket of the borough, that Kate’s ghost had begun to visit Meg.