The Binder of Sanity

Morgan Hale’s house smelled like cinnamon and rules. Harper jogged up the walkway, ring biting her pinky, backpack thumping her spine, and tried to decide how much of my basement has a seam that shimmers like heat and also my dead childhood ring just respawned she could say before Mrs. Hale called a licensed professional.

She knocked. Three times. Not on purpose—that rhythm just happened now, like her knuckles had learned a language and kept speaking it.

The door swung open on the second knock. Morgan stood there with her hair in a high, sensible ponytail and a pencil tucked behind one ear like she’d been born adjacent to a stationery aisle. She took one look at Harper’s face and stepped back to let her in.

“Coffee,” Morgan said, not as a question but as emergency protocol.

“Yes,” Harper said. “And also possibly an exorcism.”

“Great. We’re out of exorcisms, but I can do coffee and a rapid-response checklist.”

The Hale kitchen was bright and oppressive in its tidiness. The countertops were a sermon on the power of disinfectant. The whiteboard calendar above the desk had color-coded blocks for school, practice, club meetings, and family dinner!!! with three exclamation marks, which was how you knew it was compulsory. A chore chart glared from the fridge with magnets shaped like motivational suns. The spoons were arranged smallest to largest in the drawer like a police lineup. Harper’s house had never had a chart that didn’t eventually become a doodle.

Morgan slid a mug across the island and flipped open a slim, terrifying binder labeled Unexpected Events in neat block letters. Tabs stuck out like tiny, optimistic flags: Medical, Weather, School Bomb Threat (Drill), Harper.

“Wow,” Harper said, wrapping both hands around the mug to remind her body it knew warmth. “I get my own tab.”

“You’ve earned it,” Morgan said, already clicking her pen. “Okay, triage. On a scale of one to you wearing mismatched shoes for an entire school day, how bad?”

“Like… the shoes were on fire,” Harper said. “But only when I was inside my house.”

Morgan’s eyebrows did the cautious little hike they did when someone used metaphor in a situation that didn’t seem to require it. “Start from the top.”

So Harper told her. The wrong paint. The right purse. The study that was the study and not the study. The birthday card in purple ink with the six. The basement door. The twelve steps. The cold at six. The chalk line. The seam. The whisper. The ring.

She left out the parts that felt too fragile in her throat—I think my house breathed, I think the walls love me, I think I heard my mom. Some things sounded dumb if you said them too early in the morning.

Morgan didn’t interrupt. That was love. She only wrote, methodically, like she was laying down planks across a swamp so Harper could see there was a way through if she didn’t panic. Margin notes sprouted categories. Boxes multiplied. She underlined BASEMENT twice and drew an arrow that stabbed the margin like a tiny spear.

When Harper finished, the kitchen clock ticked like it wanted to be involved.

“Okay,” Morgan said, tapping the pen once against the page. “First: you are not crazy.”

Harper’s laugh came out wrong in her throat. “Debatable.”

“Second: environmental variables.” Morgan’s pen moved. “Does the weirdness happen outside the house?”

“No. Outside is aggressively normal. Mrs. Keegan was flirting with her petunias.”

“Good.” Morgan wrote CONTAINED: INTERIOR. “Third: time anomalies. Does anything seem… dated?”

Harper blinked. “The cereal boxes.” She told her about the labels, the flour bag design, the oven light that dimmed like a blink.

“Noted.” Morgan added OBJECTS: OUT-OF-DATE BRANDING and, because she couldn’t help herself, drew a simple timeline arrow: THEN → NOW. Then she added a second arrow back the other way. “Possible bidirectional exchange,” she muttered.

She turned the binder, pushing it gently toward Harper like a plate of cookies. “I’m going to say something upsetting and then I’m going to fix it.”

“Go on,” Harper said, bracing.

“Your house might be… experiencing overlapping states.” Morgan’s mouth tilted like she didn’t enjoy the phrase. “Like multiple versions of your house are stacked. Slightly misaligned. You’re walking through one and glimpsing another.”

Harper stared into her coffee like it might contain subtitles. “Okay. Love that for me.”

Morgan hesitated, then sighed. “Or,” she said carefully, “you’re sleep-deprived and your brain is manufacturing patterns because stress plus imagination equals chaos. Or your basement has radon. Or carbon monoxide. Or a gas leak that’s giving you hypnagogic hallucinations. Or—”

“Morgan.” Harper slid the purple plastic ring across the island.

Morgan went still. The little star glinted in the kitchen light. Harper’s hand shook only a little when she said, “I lost this when I was six. In the yard. My dad bribed me with popsicles so I’d stop crying. It hasn’t existed in my life for ten years.”

Morgan picked it up, turned it over, set it down again. Then she pressed her palms flat to the counter like the laminate might keep her upright. “Okay,” she said softly. “Okay. So not radon.”

“Nope.”

“Not carbon monoxide either, unless your furnace also has a vending machine for plastic jewelry.”

“Pretty sure it doesn’t.”

Morgan blew out a breath, then straightened her binder like a general snapping to attention. “Fine. We’re in conspiracy territory.”

“Oh no,” Harper groaned.

“Oh yes,” Morgan said, clicking her pen like it was a detonator. “Option one: government time-slip experiment. They’ve been rumored since the seventies. Option two: simulation grid hiccup. Reality’s code got messy in your basement. Option three: ley line interference. The Victorians loved to build houses on them, and then you get shimmer-seams. Option four—”

“Stop.” Harper held up a hand. “You had those ready.”

“Of course,” Morgan said. “I read.”

“Reddit.”

“Doesn’t make the ley lines less real.” She flipped to a clean page and printed a title: HOUSE ANOMALY — H. REED RESIDENCE. Below it she drew a laughably neat floor plan from memory. “Step one: documentation. We go back, we diagram everything—furniture positions, object versions, temperature changes, scent changes, light fluctuations—”

“Hold on,” Harper said. “We?”

“Of course ‘we.’ I’m not letting you go back into your haunted dollhouse alone.”

Warmth pricked behind Harper’s eyes—annoying, involuntary—and she looked down so Morgan wouldn’t see. “I prefer ‘mildly cursed townhouse,’ thanks.”

Morgan slid another tab into the binder—TOOLS—and made a quick list: flashlight, spare batteries, mask, chalk, tape measure, thermometer app, string. She added EMERGENCY CHOCOLATE at the bottom and double-underlined it. “Shoes,” she said. “Flashlight. Mask.”