Nora Baines

Nora Baines restores and resells antique furniture. She's always been sensitive to objects—she buys pieces that feel good and avoids pieces that feel wrong. After inheriting her grandmother's gift for psychometry, her sensitivity sharpens into something precise and dangerous: she can now feel the exact emotional residue of every piece she touches. Most pieces are sad. Some are joyful. Some hold the accumulated warmth of decades of ordinary use. Nora has learned to manage the impressions, to file them, to move on. This is her work. Then she buys a Victorian writing desk from a house sale in Herne Hill, and what she feels is not grief or warmth or any emotion she has a name for. What she feels is a decision made carefully, deliberately, with full understanding of its meaning, and then made permanent. What she feels is the clean, structural absence of remorse. *Secondhand* is supernatural horror about objects, witnessing, and the particular weight of emotional residue that doesn't fade. It follows Nora as she discovers that pieces appearing at sales across South London all carry the same final impression: the cold, methodical satisfaction of someone who has just killed. The pieces are connected. They all came from houses where families disappeared. The police files are open but cold—the kind of disappearances that leave no bodies, no evidence, no explanation. The kind where the houses are eventually sold and the furniture is eventually dispersed and no one asks what happened to the people who used to own it. Nora asks. Not because she wants to—because the pieces won't let her not ask. They're finding their way to her. The writing desk is only the first. A console table appears at a sale in Dulwich. A wardrobe at a house clearance in Crystal Palace. A mirror in Brixton. Each one carries the same cold satisfaction. Each one came from a house where a family lived and then didn't. The investigation leads Nora into the history of the missing families and the slow realizatio