The thread of solitude began before Alice could remember it, an inheritance from the orphanage that clung to her like the chill of a room without fire. She arrives at Blackwood Manor as a servant, a girl who has learned that to be invisible is to be safe. Its master, Edward Harrow, is a widower whose grief has calcified into something that fills every hall and corridor. He haunts his own home like a phantom, a fortress of devotion built around an absence.
But the manor holds both of them, and in its shadowed spaces, two isolations begin to recognise each other. A story about the shape loneliness takes when it finds another loneliness to mirror it.