She opened her eyes and said, “Lady Pent. Tell me about your childhood bedroom.”

“It was the size of this sitting room, perhaps,” said Pent promptly. “Two beds with their heads against the far wall from the door. I liked to have my younger brother sleep in my room sometimes, when I was small. Primrose walls in paste-on flimsy, not wash—a pretty chroma of the Prince Undying, but a little cockeyed—a Vit-D panel in place of a window, with a repeated design on it. My grandfather’s arm bones over the door. A little reinforced table where I played at dolls or read, with a cubby beneath it where I was meant to crouch in case a zonal jet made it past the winnow. Phosphorescent stars painted on the ceiling, a peg on the wall for my gloves and robe. I haven’t thought of it in years. Why?”

“Initial test,” said Harrowhark. “The flexibility of metaphysical solipsism aside, I have hardly any knowledge of the Fifth House and how its people live there. The more nonsensical your answer, the more likely you were to be a construction of my brain.”

Abigail laughed, but it carried a tinge of rue: the laugh of a woman who had opened a long-lost book to find the most necessary page torn out.

“Reverend Daughter,” she said, “I’ve been accused of many things, but this is the first time I’ve been assumed to be a delusion.”

“But you are—”

“A ghost,” said the woman smilingly. “A revenant, more precisely.”

Harrow the Ninth - Act Five, Chapter Forty-Three