Welcome to case closed. You're listening to The Shadow House by Anna Downs, narrated by Natasha Beaumont and the author. Let's pick up where we left off last week.

Renee, Chapter 39

Renee lifted the axe, silhouetted in the doorway, the thing looked almost human.

She held her breath as it came closer.

Was this what she'd slept through all those years ago, beams of light

and the very devil at her door.

But then her eyes and brain slowly began to calibrate the picture before her. The light was coming

from a car parked on the driveway. The roar had been its engine, and the thing was familiar. She recognized the slump of its shoulders, the angle of its neck, the dangle of its arms.

It was a person.

She held up the lantern.

Michael?

Renee, said her husband, stepping into the light.

His voice sent her reeling, crashing back in time,

back to when the house was warm and soft and filled with furniture.

She hadn't seen him in so long, years, and even though he was diminished in ways she couldn't begin to catalog, he was the same man,

same ruddy skin, same green eyes, same straw-like hair.

For a moment Renee felt foolish and grotesque. She wanted to hide,

run away, disappear right into the ground. The last time they'd seen each other, she'd had muscle tone,

curbs, hair, not much of it. By the time they'd left the farm, her scalp had already

started to show. But this would be the first time he'd seen the full extent.

Now she was all hollow spaces and sharp edges, a barren place where things no longer grew.

Burning with shame, she touched her head,

...