I watch Kasey affectionately as she bounds across the field, her ghost lumberjack eagerly following in her wake.

Before we even made it out into the garden, Kasey changed her mind about where she wanted to go.

“Oh, wait - you haven’t even been to our place yet, Jamie! Come on, let’s go there right now!”

She and Will walked right out through the garden wall, so Aiden and I had to go around and meet up with them. Kasey was impatiently rocking back and forth on her feet as she waited for us, and she took off as soon as we came around the corner.

We’ve gone out beyond the back wall of the garden. I hadn’t come out here, yet, and I didn’t know what I would find.

It turns out that behind our house there are thick, natural orchards of peach and plum trees. Drowsy birds roosting up in the boughs took off as we walked through, soft white feathers falling through an ocean of petals.

Where the orchards ended, we stepped out into a small, rambling meadow. Gently sloping hills blanketed with rich, swaying grass.

A green spring dusk is spreading over it all, tinting the air. But the sky is pale orange at the horizon, fading upwards into a deep shade of indigo, dark blue velvet beyond that. A few blazing stars are already glittering in the highest reaches.

“Pretty nice, right?” Aiden asks softly, catching the expression on my face.

“Yeah, it’s - fine,” I stammer, my wide eyes still roaming.

Crickets begin to chirp around us as we follow the ghosts. The last few glimmers of sunshine fall through their translucent figures. Their movements make it look like the wind is blowing through blonde and black hair.

They disappear together over the crest of a hill. Aiden and I follow after them a moment later, and just like that, we’re at a slow-moving tributary of the river. The same river that runs past the Ghost Office. The last of the sunlight turns its surface into a glowing mirror that shines out through the falling dusk, dotted here and there by floating water lilies. 

Surrounded by a cluster of trees growing on the slope on the hill, up and back from the water, but looking out over it - there’s a tiny, single-story cottage.

It looks old. Like, old. Historical. The door is gone, the window frames empty. The stone walls are heavy with moss, crumbling in places. Plantlife climbs right up the sides of the cottage, and flowers grow in wild bunches along them. The roof is made of red clay tiles, and there’s a gap in one corner where it must have fallen in. The timber portions of the cottage look positively ancient.

But a warm light is glowing out from inside.

I’ve stopped in my tracks at the sight of the place. Aiden gives my hand a tug, drawing me after him, following Will and Kasey inside.

From outside, the cottage gives all indications of having had no residents in an eternity. On the inside, the picture is very different.

The floors and walls are clean. There’s a bed tucked neatly into a dry corner, away from the gap in the roof. The little opening in the ceiling looks right up at the sky, and I can see the stars through it. Wind blows gently inside through all of the open windows, the open doorway.

There’s a wooden desk in here, placed near the bed. A few of Kasey’s history books are stacked on it, along with a framed picture of me and Kasey from ninth grade. Two of her old notebooks are here, too, turned open to specific pages and pinned in place by paperweights.

These are all things I recognize from the box of Kasey’s stuff that I’ve kept in my apartment all this time. I’d intended to bring it over here, but Aiden must have brought over a few things already to make the ghosts feel at home. Which makes sense, because he’s the one who picked this place for them. Actually, the ghosts can’t move or touch anything, so - Aiden must have brought all of this stuff out here. The bed, the desk… he must be the one who cleaned it, too.

I turn to look at him, then stop, my eyes finding the source of the soft, luminous glow in here. A small flame of golden light, flickering and floating in a sealed glass jar that’s been placed on the sill of the one intact window. I recognize that jar from our kitchen. It was full of spices, before.

“Neat, right?” Kasey asks happily, gazing down at the glowing light. “Aiden made it for us. It doesn’t go out.”

I stare at it, then swiftly and silently cross to Aiden, who’s been watching me with nervous blue eyes. He knows that this aspect of our new place - finding room for the ghosts to live together, comfortably, close to us - was super important to me.

“You like it for them?” Aiden asks, twisting his fingers together. “When I saw it, I just had this feeling-”

He breaks off as I reach him, wrap my arms around him, and press my face into his chest.

“You’re trying to kill me,” I say weakly, basically using him to hold myself up. “Holy shit, Aiden, you did all this? And this - this place-”

“The Haunted House, we’ve been calling it,” Will tells me brightly.

“Of course. The Haunted House.” I let out a helpless laugh against Aiden’s chest. “It’s-”

“Perfect,” Kasey sighs contentedly.

I draw back to find Aiden smiling down at me. He blushes when he catches the look in my eyes, hastily lifts his gaze over my head to the ghosts.

“What did you want us to see?” he rumbles. “You figured out a new ability? Go on and show us. The hot wings are gonna get cold.”

“Really? The hot wings are gonna get cold? I’m sorry, are you not a Heliomancer?”

“Haven’t missed all the backtalk, Kasey,” Aiden tells her, his deep voice affectionate in a way that I know means he did.

Kasey’s dark eyes blaze with excitement as Aiden and I look to her and Will, waiting for them to show us their discovery.

“Okay,” she says, speaking very fast. “So, Will and I have had a lot of alone time to talk, lately-”

“Talk, yeah, alright.”

“We talked, too, Aiden! Don’t interrupt!” Kasey holds out her shimmering hands, like she’s showing them to us. “We figured out a few things about ghosts. About us. Jamie, do you remember how when I first died and became a ghost, I was a little more - there?”

I do remember. In the first few weeks of Kasey’s afterlife, she couldn’t feel anything but herself, and I couldn’t feel her at all. But she was more solid than she is now. She could pick up light things. She could lay on me and not fall through me. We spent nights sleeping cuddled up together, like we used to do when she was alive. I could put my arm around her shoulders.

But slowly, gradually, she lost those abilities. Aiden explained that it was because to move from life to afterlife takes time. That it was part of Kasey coming into her new form, part of leaving the old one behind.

“Right, okay,” Kasey says, when I nod in answer to her question. “Well, we realized - Will has been able to move things on a few occasions, too. Like I could, at the beginning.”

Aiden and I look at Will, who appears to have finally found his way down from the cloud he was floating on. He clears his throat, tucking his thumbs into his suspenders.

“Ay, I had moved my pocket watch,” he says. “In the archives. Do you recall?”

I vividly remember the day when Will moved his own golden pocket watch, back when he was incorporeal. Kasey, Aiden, and I were theorizing about him, and the watch had suddenly trembled, then gone sliding towards Kasey. It was warm, afterwards.

That was the moment we knew for sure that Will was trying to help us find him.

“Wait, more than just the watch,” I say slowly, realizing out loud. “Will - did you move the leaves of a tree when Kasey and I went to the empty lot on Benton Street for the first time?”

Will nods. Aiden and I exchange a baffled glance.

“Can’t have been any leftover life energy that made that happen,” Aiden murmurs, his eyebrows furrowing. “Will, you’ve been dead for two hundred years.”

“Exactly,” Kasey jumps in, pointing at Aiden. “What I was using in the beginning was my leftover life energy. But that’s not what Will used. He used ghost energy.”

“But I had to give over all of my energy,” Will explains, a pained look touching his eyes. “Often I would - lose myself, after. It would take time for me to know I was myself again, and I could not remember anything from the intervening time.”

Aiden and I both wince sympathetically at Will.

“But it means that ghost energy can move things,” Kasey says, her dark hair dancing around her shoulders as she bounces excitedly. “It just takes more of our energy. A lot more. All of it, basically. We need more than what we have, to do that.”

"And then we realized,” Will says, holding out a hand to Kasey. “That if we could give over our energy into physical things, we could probably give it to each other, too.”

Kasey takes Will’s hand and laces her fingers through his. “Which way, this time?”

“It’s all yours, Ms. Lavoe,” Will answers.

Both ghosts close their eyes and fall silent. Will slowly bows his head, and - something starts to change.

Will is blurring around the edges, his outlines growing fuzzy. His big, burly form is slowly fading towards invisibility, and at the same time, Kasey is growing brighter. She’s becoming more sharply defined, more colorful, less transparent.

Will lets out a breath and releases Kasey’s hand. As soon as he lets her go, I nearly lose sight of him. He’s barely there, although I can still make out his face as he tosses a stray blonde strand out of his eyes and looks at Kasey. Clearly he hasn’t disintegrated, hasn’t lost himself.

And Kasey… she looks so solid, I could almost reach out and touch her.

Without thinking, I move to do just that. Kasey opens her eyes, sees my hand reaching for her. She lifts hers to meet it, and our palms stop each other. They don’t go right through.

We can’t really feel each other, and I think that if I pushed, my fingers would glide right through Kasey’s palm, but still. My hand has met resistance, and so has hers.

I let out a sharp breath, and Kasey breaks into a gigantic smile that closes her eyes and rounds out her cheeks.

“Jamie,” she says happily.

“Holy shit,” I stammer.

Aiden watches with wide, disbelieving eyes as I let out another ragged exhale and pull Kasey into a close hug. I hold her as tight as I can without crossing the boundaries of her fragile solidity.

This is the first real hug I’ve been able to give her in as long as I can remember.

“Oh, my god,” I manage, as she wraps her arms around me, too. “Kase-face! I know we can’t feel this, but somehow it feels so good!”

She laughs, and while ghosts can’t cry, it sounds a little watery. “I know what you mean.”

“Can you move things, too?” Aiden asks.

“Yeah, but I’m not gonna demonstrate. It eats up a lot of energy. If I don’t have any energy to give back to Will, he has to recharge on his own, and that takes time.”

“Give it back?” I repeat, and Kasey nods, steps out of my arms.

“Here, I’ll show you. We should give Will a turn, anyways.”

She starts to go towards Will, then pauses. Without warning, she turns and throws her arms around Aiden, gives him an affectionate hug, too.

Aiden breaks into a surprised smile as he hugs her back.

Kasey squeezes him, then lets him go and darts back to Will, who I can only barely discern from the cool purple shadows in the low-lit cottage. But Kasey’s fingers find his, and she closes her eyes again.

Aiden and I watch in amazement as everything happens in reverse. Will grows sharper and brighter, more saturated with color, and Kasey fades to a soft, silvery shadow.

Seeing Will like this is a strange experience.

It’s like he stepped out through one of those antique photos in the archives. He would fit right in with the rest of the men in the timber company pictures. His heavy workboots are caked with mud, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up like he just did them during a break at the log drive. As if he’d be ready to spring back onto the river at any moment.

He’s a presence, too. He stands almost to a height with Aiden, his broad shoulders almost imperceptibly straining his suspenders. He looks rugged in the way all young working men of his time period seem to, more weathered than a twenty-five-year-old of today. But he does look young, with some kind of boyish charm still about his face. He smiles at us warmly, clear green eyes twinkling.

He looks like he stepped right out of history.

Kasey watches him with adoring eyes as he gently drops her fingers and steps forward. He hesitates, uncertain, then slowly extends a tentative hand to me and Aiden.

Aiden is closer, so he reaches out and meets Will’s hand halfway. Will freezes, then lets out a dazed laugh when his palm doesn’t go through Aiden’s.

Aiden lets out a laugh of his own, still in disbelief. “You want a hug, too, man?”

“Oh, really?” Will asks, sounding very pleased by the offer.

Aiden clearly didn’t expect to be taken up on it, but he shrugs and opens his arms. He huffs out another laugh as Will instantly steps in to hug him.

“My family would consider this to be quite forward and inappropriate,” Will informs us, immediately moving to hug me next. “Which makes it twice as delightful, I must say.”

I laugh as I let him go. “Happy to help you shock and scandalize, dude.”

I hear a sound, the faintest little noise that could have been just an echo or the breeze. Kasey, laughing with us.

“When did hugging become a casual thing?” I ask Will. “Not in your lifetime?”

“That is a question for our beloved resident historian,” he answers, taking Kasey’s hand again. “Let’s get her back, shall we?”

Kasey slowly comes back to her usual brightness, and in tandem, Will fades back to his. When they’re done, they open their eyes, see that it worked, and break into victorious grins.

“First of all, there’s no single answer to your hug question, Jamie,” Kasey says. “There’s a different answer for every culture, pretty much. Second of all - did you guys fucking see that?”

She dissolves into blissful laughter, throws herself back on the bed.

“Oh, man,” she says, staring at the ceiling, oblivious to the rest of us beaming at her. “This is so good. Now we can get Aiden’s attention when he doesn’t have the glasses on. We can move things, when we really want to… I could even turn my own pages when I’m reading.”

Will turns back to me and Aiden. “And we have a further theory.”

Kasey sits up, nodding excitedly. “Okay, so Will and I can’t leave Ketterbridge until we have a battery, right? Because we’re powered by the Guardian Tree, and right now, we can’t take its energy with us.”

“Right…?”

“But maybe,” Kasey goes meaningfully, “If one of us had an extra reserve of energy, like the kind that we can give each other…”

“Oh - one of you could leave town,” I realize out loud, my eyes widening.

Will nods at me. “We’ve yet to put the theory to the test. And our energy is limited, so whoever leaves can only stay away for so long.”

“Yeah, we definitely need to run some careful experiments before we try it,” Kasey adds. “But the point is - this means that maybe the next time you guys go to Port Sitka to work on the case…”

“We can take one of you with us,” Aiden finishes, and all four of us break into wide, matching smiles.