Chapter One: The Midnight Screening Never Ended

The first time Lin Mo saw the house, rain was falling across the screen. It lashed the three upstairs windows. The right one had been bricked shut, vivid moss growing in its seams. The camera moved past a rusted mailbox, over the crescent-shaped chip in the seventh porch step, and stopped at the number 13. Someone in the theater inhaled sharply. Lin did not. Her fingers had already found the pale scar on her left knee. Her memories before eight were a reel cut apart by careless scissors. A few frames leaked through: wet timber, cherries in a blue-rimmed bowl, a woman upstairs calling, “Little Mo, don’t turn around.” Therapists called them a child’s reconstruction of trauma.