The House That Wore Our Faces

When disgraced grief counselor Mara Venn takes a winter caretaker job at Blackdove House, she expects isolation, bad plumbing, and a chance to outrun the scandal that ended her career. Perched on a storm-eaten island off the coast of Maine, the mansion was once an experimental asylum where patients vanished during a mass blackout in 1979. The owner’s only rule is simple: never remove the mirrors from their walls.

At first, the house seems merely decayed. Then Mara hears therapy sessions through locked doors, finds wet footprints leading from mirrors, and meets reflections that linger a heartbeat too long. Her journal fills with entries she doesn’t remember writing, each one describing childhood memories that are almost hers. As a nor’easter cuts the island off, Mara discovers Blackdove House was not built to contain madness, but to feed something vast beneath it—something that learns people by wearing their guilt.

To survive, Mara must decide which memories are real, which face is her own, and whether the thing in the glass has already left the island wearing her life.