The house had more rooms than it should. Daniel had measured the exterior three times — he was that kind of man, the kind who measures things, who trusts numbers over the soft evidence of feeling. The exterior measured sixty-two by forty-one feet. He had mapped every room he could find and the numbers did not add up. There was space unaccounted for. Roughly the size, he had calculated with a kind of obsessive precision, of a small bedroom.
His daughter Ada had found it first, naturally. She was seven and had no investment in the numbers. She had simply followed the cat through a door that Daniel had walked past a hundred times without registering, a door that was there because of course it was there, because it had always been there, and he had simply never noticed. He wanted very much for this to be true. He did not think it was.
The room inside was furnished. That was the part he could not construct an explanation for — not just a forgotten storage space but a room with a chair by a window that looked out onto a garden that was not in the right place, a room that smelled like someone's particular sleep, a room with a child's drawing pinned above the empty fireplace. The drawing showed their house. It had an extra room drawn in careful crayon, tucked where the wall should be. In the window of the drawn room, a small figure waved outward.
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