July 1998. Greenbriar Lane, outside the old Evergreen Motel in Needles, California. A woman named Cora, fleeing a bad marriage in a borrowed car, stops for the night and finds a tortoiseshell comb under the buzzing streetlight in the parking lot. The comb is warm, almost body-temperature, and has a single long blonde hair caught in its teeth. She brings it to her room — and that's when she starts hearing the count. Every time she looks at the comb, a child's voice, soft and precise, says the next number. She is not the first person to find this comb. She will not be the last. A story about inheritance, recursion, and the objects that choose us.