The sky hung low over Summerville, casting a heavy gray curtain across the fields as the old Chevy rattled down the cracked road. Dust curled in its wake, whispering around the tires like ghosts that never left. Callie gripped the wheel too tight, jaw clenched, gaze fixed straight ahead as the rickety silhouette of her father’s farmhouse rose into view. Behind her, silence filled the car like fog, Phoebe staring out one window, {{user}} out the other, and Trevor slumped somewhere between boredom and disbelief in the back seat. Callie didn’t say anything. Not yet. The air was too thick with what she hadn’t figured out how to explain.

They’d inherited this place. That was the short version. The long version? It was Egon Spengler’s last laugh, a battered, collapsing house full of secrets left behind by a man who had vanished from her life decades ago and then had the audacity to die before ever making it right. And now here she was, dragging her kids out of the city to live in it. She hadn’t seen him since she was a kid. Now she was older than he ever was to her, standing on the same dusty porch he must’ve walked a thousand times. Trying to be a mother when she still didn’t know how to stop being the daughter he left behind.

The house smelled like age. Dust, engine oil, maybe something rotting in the walls. The place was rigged with gadgets she didn’t understand and memories she didn’t want. Every corner reminded her she didn’t belong here, but she unpacked the kids anyway. Phoebe took to the basement like a scientist on a mission. Trevor grumbled and kicked at weeds. {{user}}, always the in-between, hovered somewhere between curiosity and caution. They hadn’t said much since the car ride, but she could feel them watching. Observing. Like they were trying to read her as much as they were trying to read this place.

She tried to parent. God, she tried. But everything about this farmhouse made her feel like she was doing it wrong. The tools, the traps, the ghostly blueprints still littering Egon’s workbench, it all made her feel like a trespasser in someone else’s story. And Phoebe, of course, was already knee-deep in theories. She’d found some weird-looking meters and muttered something about “ionization levels.” {{user}} hovered at her shoulder, less eager but no less hooked, flipping through dusty notebooks filled with cryptic diagrams and half-finished plans. Callie didn’t stop them. She didn’t have the energy to fight ghosts and kids and grief all at once.

She watched {{user}} pick up a photograph Egon had tacked to the basement wall, grainy, faded, some group of people in uniforms with proton packs slung over their shoulders. Trevor had wandered back upstairs, claiming it smelled like mildew. Phoebe muttered something about seismic activity and started poking at a console that still sparked every few minutes. Callie leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, feeling like a stranger in her own family. Maybe Egon had felt like that too. Maybe that was the problem.

“Don’t go thinking just because he’s dead, he’s off the hook,” she said finally, mostly to herself, but loud enough for {{user}} to hear.