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Olive and Haley quickly discover that their room sits directly above the inn. They have a difficult time falling asleep through the racket of chairs and tables bumping downstairs. There's a sound like a broom thumping against the ceiling, and the occasional frustrated exclamation from Devon. All of this continues well into the night.

Olive pulls the comforter over her head like a forcefield, flickers of light from Haley's reading lamp illuminating the fibers. She remembers Lila reassuring her three years ago: "Think of them as people, too, only deceased. Help your sister bring out the drinks; go on. They won't drink them, of course, but it's a nice gesture. You'll want the same, someday."

She says it so casually.

Olive flips onto her stomach, her eyes smooshed closed against the cold sheets.

Sometime during the night, the inn settles down, and it's as if the entire house breathes a sigh of relief. Haley gradually drifts off, missing her own bed without completely missing home. Olive sleeps for half an hour before a night terror jars her awake, and she knows she won’t make it back to sleep. She wonders if she might be able to finish her book tonight. 

She’s still awake when she hears Neil, Devon, and Bree emerge from the inn with tired, lagging footsteps. She’s still awake when the front door creaks open as Bree sneaks back to whatever house she belongs to. She’s still awake when the sun rises and Haley stretches her arms, her red hair poking out from underneath the blanket. 

Haley notices Olive and immediately knows. “I told you to wake me up if you can’t sleep.”

“I’m a big kid,” Olive says. “They’re just nightmares.”

“But they’re not just nightmares,” Haley says, exasperated. “That’s what Lila said last time we were here. Why won’t you tell anyone?”

“The only reason we’re here in the first place instead of climbing rocks and building bonfires at summer camp is because you keep telling people,” Olive shoots back. “It’s my choice, isn’t it?”

“Will you promise me you’ll talk to Lila?” Haley asks.

“I might,” Olive says.

The girls tiptoe downstairs to find that the boys are still sleeping. They explore the backyard garden, where morning mist hangs low over the wild grass. The garden is a small, flattened plot of dirt sharing an inharmonious edge with the aggressive forest vegetation. The dirt is combed into rough lines, which are dotted with little mounds where early summer vegetables are just beginning to stretch their fragile leaves skyward. Haley untangles one sweet pea vine from another, watching how they curl together like capsizing shipmates.

The boys sleep until four in the afternoon, realize they're behind on chores, and shuffle off to open up the inn and bring in the laundry and snip at the invasive blackberries that keep popping up along the perimeter of the woods. Lila is still nowhere to be found. When Olive asks Devon where she's gone, he says casually, "to another dimension." When Olive looks confused, he elaborates: "She usually pokes her head in every now and again. Musta forgot you were coming."

The next few nights are calmer than the first. Haley and Olive get used to being ignored. Devon spends most of his time writing college essays and disappears some evenings to lead "haunted tours" of the town for the early-season tourists. When Haley says this sounds like a lot of fun, Devon responds, "you would think that," and Haley can't tell if there's any affection in the statement.

Neither of the girls is sure where Neil spends most of his time. He seems to vanish and appear without warning to pilfer breakfast foods from the kitchen. Neil and Bree go on periodic grocery runs in his beat-up red truck, which wheezes when it starts up. They come back with food and garden supplies and Olive wonders where their money comes from. Ghosts certainly don't pay to stay in the inn – which, as far as she can tell, isn't even an inn. More of a cafe where nobody eats.

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Even though the inn has stopped making strange noises, Olive makes Haley promise to wait until she has Lila's permission to enter. She still catches her sister snooping with her ear against the door.

On the third day, Haley offers to help with the chores and Devon gives her a rusty lopper; Haley spends the rest of the day getting needled by blackberry thorns and feeling useful. 

"Why would anyone want to rip out blackberries?" Haley mutters to Olive, who sits beside her with a sketchbook propped on her knee. "They're so tasty."

After a day taking care of the nasty thorny blackberries, and an evening of Olive wiping antiseptic onto her scratched arms and ankles, Haley doesn't wonder this anymore.

The next morning, Devon tells her she has to pull the blackberries out by the roots, not just snip at the branches. She goes out and does it all again, digging for the tenacious ball of root, her hatred for the blackberries deepening.

Bree visits periodically. She does a lot of the heavy lifting; carrying bags of compost and shovelfuls of sod to the compost bin out back, where worms chew away at scraps of dinner and the shreds of Haley's blackberry crusade. Bree and Neil show Haley and Olive how to train the snap pea vines to cling to little wooden scaffolds. Olive is too delicate when she untangles the vines and gets very little done. Haley gets frustrated and rips a few vine tendrils clean off. Both are eventually, politely, asked to watch.

Haley sits on the grass, stroking Lila’s calico cat. "What was happening in the inn the other night?" She ventures. Nobody has spoken of it since the day she and Olive arrived.

"Oh, a ghost got stuck," Bree says, latching a little vine to a spear of wood. "We close the inn at sundown. Sometimes a ghost will get lost, or decide not to leave, and bumble around causing trouble."

Neil nods.

"Why not just let them stay the night?" Haley asks.

"Ghosts after dark," Bree shivers. "You don't want that. There’s something pacifying about sunlight."

“That ghost didn’t sound pacified the other night,” Haley points out. “Even before the sun went down.”

On the fifth day, Olive and Haley go out into the woods for a hike to explore the surrounding woods. The woods are exactly as Olive remembers them, somehow cozy and vast at the same time, smothering in their dampness and endless in their possibilities. She's not sure if she loves them or fears them. There's too much big-ness to be bundled up into one feeling.

"Everything grows on everything here," Haley says, pointing at a tree reaching skyward from the coddling branch of another, massive tree. Everything drips with moss and vines and everything is some flavor of green. 

When Haley and Olive get home, they’re surprised to find a cake waiting for them on the counter, frosted in chocolate, surrounded by little candles plucked from end tables on the living room. 

"We were going to wait until Lila got here," Bree says. "Buuuut she's taking too long. Devon and I made it. Neil did the lettering. His handwriting's the best."

Neil gives them a thumbs-up.

They enjoy the cake together on the back lawn as the sun sets over the mountains, long grasses tickling their legs, gnats zipping around their heads. The next few days are sunny and warm; Olive and Haley get better in the garden; Haley's even allowed to poke her head into the inn. All in all, the week is uneventful until Devon makes fun of Haley one time too many, and she punches him in the jaw.

“Excuse me?”

Haley and Devon look up from where they’re struggling on the floor of the inn, surrounded by a ring of ghostly spectators, and see Lila standing over them, arms crossed. It’s the first they’ve seen of her all week. 

There’s something… off about her. As if she’s not quite there. The walls of the inn are visible through her transparent midsection. But her anger blazes through, across dimensions, in a torrent. Hologram or not, transparent or not, she seems to have retained her talent for showing up when the kids are fighting.

Haley is escorted to Lila’s office and waits to be reprimanded. She sits outside the door, listening to the pitter-patter of rain on the roof. Olive comes and stands over her, glowering.

"No fighting," Olive reminds her, hands planted on slender hips.

"Except," is all Haley says.

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