Maria Machado’s story unsettled me in a way that felt deliberate and earned. At first you focus on the relentless haunting aspects but underneath all the odd incidents is something subtle about a marriage coming apart. The supernatural elements don’t cause the distance between the two women so much as reveal it and amplify it. The house becomes an externalization of what they can’t say to each other.

What struck me most was the ending. After everything they argued about and all the people they brought in to “resolve” the haunting, the narrator opens a door and sees two women from another century, easy and intimate, laughing in bed together. It finally clicked that this isn’t about a haunted house, it’s about a broken marriage that’s being wasted. She slams the door. Then opens it again. And her wife is standing there, looking mournful.

The entire time, the story was arguing that the real haunting was always the risk of losing each other, and that what it took to see that was a ghost showing them what tenderness actually looks like for her to realize.