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Return Policy: A Gothic Ghost Story
Every item has a history. Some of them want to come home.
Colleen Maguire sells other people's pasts. From a converted garage in the Midlands she runs Second Lives, a five-star eBay shop loved for its tender, imagined histories that make strangers cry over a cake tin.
Then the parcels start arriving.
No sender. No order number. Her name printed in letters set slightly too far apart. Inside, wrapped in her own tissue a mug she knows but cannot place. A frame with nothing in it. A child's shoe that smells of smoke.
Every one of them burned in a house fire thirty-two years ago.
Each comes with a five-star review from a buyer called 31102026, written in a voice uncomfortably like her own. A kitchen clock keeps perfect time without a battery. The hallway takes fourteen steps instead of eleven. Her nine-year-old son draws a house he has never seen.
And something is counting down to the thirty-first of October.
Colleen has spent her life making sure the past stays sealed. Now it is being returned, item by item — and there is no return policy.
A haunting, compassionate ghost story about memory, silence and what it costs to keep a secret. For readers of Susan Hill, Sarah Waters and Catriona Ward.
Colleen Maguire sells other people's pasts. From a converted garage in the Midlands she runs Second Lives, a five-star eBay shop loved for its tender, imagined histories that make strangers cry over a cake tin.
Then the parcels start arriving.
No sender. No order number. Her name printed in letters set slightly too far apart. Inside, wrapped in her own tissue a mug she knows but cannot place. A frame with nothing in it. A child's shoe that smells of smoke.
Every one of them burned in a house fire thirty-two years ago.
Each comes with a five-star review from a buyer called 31102026, written in a voice uncomfortably like her own. A kitchen clock keeps perfect time without a battery. The hallway takes fourteen steps instead of eleven. Her nine-year-old son draws a house he has never seen.
And something is counting down to the thirty-first of October.
Colleen has spent her life making sure the past stays sealed. Now it is being returned, item by item — and there is no return policy.
A haunting, compassionate ghost story about memory, silence and what it costs to keep a secret. For readers of Susan Hill, Sarah Waters and Catriona Ward.
194 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 26, 2026
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