Goodreads asked Tiya Miles:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Tiya Miles Once, when my husband and I were looking for a house with charm in Ann Arbor, Michigan to suit our growing family, we saw a listing that ticked all my boxes. The house was cheap (which we needed), very old (which I love), and located on a street known for Underground Railroad activity (a big bonus for history buffs). We arrived as soon as the appropriate hour struck for the open house. Strangely, we were the only prospective buyers in sight. Not even curious neighbors had turned up to peek inside. Seconds in, we thought we knew why. The structure was filled with a sense of foreboding that we both felt. Somehow, the spaces seemed physically misaligned. The hallways felt narrow, and the flow of rooms had no logical arrangement. There was a prevalent mood of lost-ness. In my memory, the home was dark and cluttered, too.

But can I trust my memory? I don't know how much of what I am sharing here is true about the house, because the accuracy of that memory has been compromised. My memory of the house has grainy spots in it, like the fuzzy places that sometimes appear on Google Maps "street view" because someone has blotted them out. My husband's memory is splotchy, too. "Was it a hoarded house?" He asked me recently, as we tried to recall what exactly had been wrong with that place. "Was that the one where we almost stepped into dog crap in a back hallway?"

After my husband and I hustled out (as quickly as we could while trying not to offend the realtor whose face I cannot recall), we asked each other what could have happened in the home's history, because it had to have been something to trigger our instinctual flight response. We wouldn't have been surprised, we said, if a body was buried beneath stacks of misbegotten things in the basement. To this day, I wonder what would have happened if we had tried to buy that house. After all, the price was right. Or was it?

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