It was late October, the kind of cold that settles into a house and stays. I was going through an old hard drive from a storage unit auction—just photos, mostly, from the early 2000s. One folder was labeled 'Big Lick Road.' The pictures showed a white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a tire swing, a woman in a floral dress. But every photo had the same thing: a man standing in the background, half-hidden behind trees, inside the barn, at the edge of the driveway. In later photos, he was closer to the house. Then on the porch. Then inside the frame of a window. I started stacking the images by timestamp, and I realized they were taken in sequence—like someone was walking toward the house over the course of a year, one step per photo. The last picture showed the porch door open, the woman staring at the camera, and behind her, a hand on her shoulder. I looked up the address. The house burned down in 2005. The woman's name was Evelyn. She never reported anyone living in the house but her.