I'll Be Waiting

Nicola Laughton grew up with cystic fibrosis and never expected adulthood. Medicine gave her one, and Anton gave her a future to want. Months into their marriage he died in a car crash, conscious just long enough to tell her he would be waiting for her. A bystander sold that moment to the press, and Nicola's private grief became a story strangers feel entitled to.

To stop her spiral, her friends and family arrange a seance with a parapsychologist at the Lake Erie beach house Anton's family once owned. The medium has barely begun when the house starts answering: doors unlock themselves, insects swarm the windows, and a long-dead dumbwaiter creaks in an empty shaft.

Kelley Armstrong keeps both readings alive — haunting or hoax — while quietly widening the gap between what Nicola tells the others and what she knows. She has contacted the dead before, and Nicola is not the name she was born with.