In the summer of 2021, I spent a week at a rental cottage in the town of Clay's Mill, Ohio, a place with exactly one main street and a creek that everyone called Stillwater. The cottage was clean and sweet-smelling, with a porch swing and a jar of dried lavender on the kitchen counter. But the first night, I found a notebook in the nightstand drawer. It wasn't the guestbook. It was a spiral-bound composition book, half-filled with the same handwriting, all dated from the previous June. The entries were short, each one describing something the writer had seen through the cottage's front window after midnight. A figure crossing the yard. A light from the abandoned house across the creek. The writer's name, signed once on the last page, was Natalie. I never met Natalie, but I started seeing what she saw. And by the third night, I understood why she never came back to finish the notebook. This is a story about looking where you shouldn't, and about the things that look back.