Antoinette — Antsy — is very young when the home she loves stops being safe, and one day she runs, following an impulse and a strange certainty toward a door she's never seen before. It opens onto the Shop Where the Lost Things Go: a warm, cluttered way station between worlds where every missing sock, misplaced key, and lost child eventually washes up, tended by an old woman named Vineta and a talking magpie named Hudson.
For a while it is exactly the sanctuary Antsy needs, and the shop's back door opens onto an endless succession of new worlds to explore. But magic in the shop runs on a hidden economy, and Antsy slowly realizes that each journey through a door is quietly costing her something precious and irreplaceable — and that the adults around her may not have told her the whole truth about the bargain she's making.
Seanan McGuire's eighth Wayward Children novella is a gentle but unflinching story — written with an explicit note of care about children in danger — that turns the series' portal magic toward questions of safety, trust, exploitation, and the true cost of a place to belong.