Here’s how things unfold: on the very first day the house is listed, while she’s tidying the kitchen between showings for potential buyers, she notices a boy.
A boy about seven, with a dreamy expression, dressed in a brown school uniform, sits on one of the chairs. He isn’t a product of her imagination but a tangible presence, as solid as the stove or the fridge. At first, encountering him provokes the same faint disgust that the wealthy often display—an almost theatrical, polished air—though tempered here by childhood. The boy’s hands rest on his knees; he wears black ankle boots with no socks, and his bangs sweep across his forehead with an air of unearned pride. He resembles a thief, tiny and intent on being accepted, yet he makes no move to be friendly or to explain himself. After the initial shock, unable to determine what precisely feels off, she studies his face. He appears so at home in this space that asking where he came from seems absurd; he seems a natural emanation, a being born from the walls, from the dust that twinkles in the air. He sits as if he’s been waiting for an afternoon snack since some distant moment in the past. She, for her part, feels no fear, only a slight flutter. A bumblebee slams into the window from the inside, and for a few seconds that’s all that happens: the bee’s persistence, the empty kitchen in an empty house, and the stunned response of a thirty-something real estate agent confronted with a seven-year-old boy watching her. A boy who, she now realizes, has not blinked once.
The sight convinces her that the house will never sell. The house is like the boy: too refined, impractical, crafted for a mid-century set of wealthy buyers who preferred rationalist design over comfort and show. Nowadays no one would pay a fortune for a place that isn’t cozy or that flaunts its cost. That’s what she told her boss the first time he showed it to her—that the place was a lost cause, that months would be spent showing it to architecture students and in the end they’d conclude as much. Yet after a week spent polishing the first and second floors, the garage, and the yard, after memorizing the architect’s data sheet and directing painters to achieve perfection—this moment arrives. She nearly breaks into laughter, but the boy’s gaze steadies her. It isn’t merely his antiquated outfit; the fact that he doesn’t blink lends his expression a leveling power, as if everything in his gaze is stripped bare to its simplest components. And yet there’s nothing sinister about him, though there could be, much like a hyper-realistic doll that you mistake for a child until you recognize it’s not alive. His presence, though solid, carries a certain instability. Her feelings toward him swing—uncertainty and attraction intermixed. It’s the first time something like this has happened to her, and paradoxically it doesn’t bring the fear she might have anticipated. In other houses, a sense of being watched has sometimes driven her to flee; now this child stares at her without blinking, and she feels only a vague revulsion toward his privilege.
“What do you want?” she asks. And when the boy doesn’t answer, she repeats, closer to blunt,
“What do you want?”
Then he appears as if to rise, and she steps back. She’s still wearing the rubber gloves she used for kitchen cleaning, which makes the boy smile, or at least that’s how she reads it.
“Listen,” she continues almost as if addressing a dog, “you can’t stay here. Do you understand? People are coming.”
It occurs to her, perhaps, that even though she can see him, the distance between them is immense, and that realization brings a sense of relief. There are many ways to dodge accountability, and this one doesn’t look so bad. Yet the boy reacts: he stands, lifts his hand, and waves goodbye. She returns the gesture. In that final moment, as he pivots and walks down the hallway and she can no longer see him, she feels in his small body a kind of animal distress, almost unbearable.
She has never been the type to pry, to unsettle things, to demand explanations. She loves her job at the agency, and that’s about it. She possesses a gift of sorts—the way some people have a knack for sports or music. Since childhood she’s carried a sense that houses speak to her in a way that feels almost automatic; she can gauge what they’re like the moment she steps inside. While others might see floor plans and materials, she perceives bodies, personalities, intimate, malleable flesh. Yet unlike the houses, the people inside them rarely feel real to her, their faces and emotions out of reach. Perhaps the houses are just a pretext, a bridge to what she cannot touch in people. She isn’t sure. All she knows is she loves houses, excels at staging them, selling them, renting them, and she feels like a bridge between two strangers who are seeking each other. In that space, she has found her place in the world. She doesn’t dwell on it. Ultimately, her lack of sentimentality invites others to feel; she isn’t much bothered by what she cannot obtain. Beneath that façade lies a certain inherent insensitivity. Half-joking, she tells herself that her personality is like the white lies that populate classified ads: impeccably, sunlit, newly renovated. Phrases that only credulity or cynicism can test, and which, after all, are proven true or false not by a space’s actual brightness or the extent of renovations but by the buyer’s longing for light or for everything to feel brand-new. After all, desire shapes perception. Buyers see what they want to see.
Perhaps that’s why the boy’s appearance unsettles her so much. What should she do with that charged energy? For years, the fear that something like this could happen acted as a kind of compelled desire; now that it has become real, it almost feels offensive.
She considered telling her boss when she dropped off today’s keys; now, back home, she wants to tell the man she lives with about it. But she doesn’t. Repeating aloud that she saw a boy who didn’t blink in an empty house carries a sense of validation, yet it also underscores what didn’t occur. The boy didn’t reappear, though she waited for him for nearly three hours. Perhaps that’s why, when the man she lives with asks about her day, she says it was fine and recounts the house, that dwelling for a particular class of mid-century rich who preferred rational design over comfort or ostentation. She adds that today two couples came to view it, one rejected it outright, and though it’s possible the other may still buy.
She’s seen the mechanics of this play so many times that it almost makes her smile: one partner asserts themselves, the other yields; one wins, almost never the obvious choice, often the more rational one. The man asks about the house’s character, and she tells him it spans just under three thousand square feet, two levels, four bedrooms and three bathrooms, plus a dining room and a library, and even a small backyard pool. Yet the plan feels crowded no matter where you stand, and the light seems conspicuously scarce despite the abundance of windows.
She realizes, for the first time with true clarity, that the pattern repeats: she understands things only when she narrates them. And she understands that the house feels snug when you move through it but loose when you pause. Then, as soon as she voices the thought, she recalls the boy again—the unmoving lashes, the way he exited the kitchen and drifted down the corridor on a routine, repetitive course.
“I understand,” says the man.
She nods, meeting his gaze, and thinks that perhaps there was nothing to understand, yet he returns her smile.
She does not love him, but that is, in her own way, how she loves him. The man she shares a home with is a large man, perhaps too large. She felt drawn to him the day they first met, two years prior, when she showed him the apartment they now inhabit together. She liked his body, and the way his heart had been emptied by a prior relationship, and the mix of civility as a public servant and a free-spirited temperament. When they began dating, the few things she truly knew about him were that he taught biology at the university and had written a book on mushrooms. He spoke of mushrooms with names she could hardly pronounce—Crepidotus, Mycenainterrupta, Marasmius—and he shared images of otherworldly creatures on his phone, both beautiful and unsettling, and she thought that everything inside him moved at a glacial pace.
Initially, loving him felt almost instinctive. For the first time in her life, she chose to do what she was supposed to do, simply to test whether, once she acted, she would feel the expected thing. She assumed that eventually she’d leave him, and that he’d bear the brunt of it, perhaps she would as well, in a forgiving, almost indulgent way. She valued his erudition and the pain he carried from his failed marriage, which left him with a certain wounded rigidity. She was curious to see how far she could penetrate that core. And there was this: she had never cohabited with anyone before. He seemed the ideal test subject for that experiment.
Then, against all odds, living together proved manageable, punctuated by stretches of quiet ease. The man she lives with—like the fungi he studies—unfolded his subtle spores gradually, and she grew accustomed to them.
When he climbs into bed, the mattress sags beneath his weight and he switches off the light. In the darkness, she recalls the boy with greater clarity—their uniforms not quite brown but a kind of beige; his hair not truly black but a very dark brown. He is a touch tubby, yet there’s something affable about that weight. Beneath his bangs, his eyes are smaller than average, unusually sensitive to brightness. He doesn’t seem shy so much as inquisitive. And there’s something off about the way his gaze travels over her body, unblinking, precise, taking in each feature in slow, unhurried detail.
“I saw a boy at the house today,” she whispers.
In the darkness, the man she lives with does not move.
“And?” he asks after a moment.
“That’s all there is to it.”
“You saw a boy in the house and that’s it?”
“Yes,” she replies.
When the man turns toward her, she sees two watery pools with a faint, uneasy glimmer. A moment later he bursts into laughter. And she laughs as well. With relief. Not at the comic, but at not having said more than necessary.
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Adapted from LAST DAY OF A PRIOR LIFE: A Novel by Andrés Barba. Reprinted with the publisher’s permission, HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2026 by Andrés Barba.
