In the winter of 2021, a woman named Cora moved into a former convent in the tiny town of Mercy, Ohio. The building had been deconsecrated decades ago, but the nuns left something behind — a porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary, life-sized, in a locked basement room. Cora heard it crying at night, a thin, dry sound like a child's sob. When she tried to move the statue, she found it was bolted to the floor — but the bolt heads had been painted over, part of the statue's base. The sobbing stopped the night she found the hole in the wall behind it, a small hollow space containing a leather journal and a single, long-dead rose. The journal belonged to Sister Agnes, the last nun to live in the convent, who wrote that she had trapped something inside the statue — a grief too large to be carried alone. Cora left Mercy the next morning, but the crying has followed her, faint, always at the edge of hearing, like a radio caught between stations.