We Used to Live Here

Eve Palmer and her girlfriend Charlie Bastion have recently purchased 3709 Heritage Lane to renovate and resell when Thomas Faust arrives with his wife, Paige, and their three children. Thomas says he grew up in the house and asks for a short tour. After worsening weather and a bridge closure prevent the family from leaving, Thomas tells Eve that his sister Alison became convinced during childhood that objects, rooms, memories, and eventually members of her own family were changing around her.

Eve begins encountering similar contradictions. Familiar features of the house change, Charlie's locket appears above the fireplace on a nail Eve had removed, and people give incompatible accounts of Thomas and Alison's past. An old man in a nearby cabin warns Eve that the Faust family is not what it looks like and tells her to make them leave. Later, after Eve and Charlie leave for a motel, Eve receives a call on Charlie's phone from a frightened voice identical to Charlie's claiming that she never left the house. Eve notices that the Charlie beside her is missing a distinctive finger tattoo and drives back to 3709 Heritage Lane believing the real Charlie and Shylo remain there.

Inside the altered house, Eve discovers hidden rooms, paintings, photographs, and a note apparently written by Alison that claims Thomas inserted himself into her family and changed her memories. Eve then experiences a sequence presented as Alison's memories in which young Thomas appears from the woods before Alison's home and family begin changing. The house shifts again, and Thomas now treats Eve as his sister Emma and the children's aunt. Eve decides to play along until she sees Charlie's locket around Paige's neck. The confrontation turns violent: Paige dies after stabbing Eve in the thigh, Eve badly injures Thomas during two separate attacks, and police arrest Eve before she can escape.

Nearly three years later, Eve is confined at Greenwood Asylum after being found not guilty by reason of insanity. Official records, neighbors, her supposed parents, and Charlotte Bastion identify her as Emma Faust rather than Eve Palmer, so Eve pretends to accept that account in hopes of eventually obtaining probation. Thomas visits and returns Charlie's locket, which still contains the blurry photograph Eve remembers as the only known photograph of Eve Palmer. A final anonymous forum post describes someone returning to a recently purchased property that now appears abandoned for decades, finding their partner gone and erased from everyone else's memory while their dog remains nearby. The post leaves the identities redacted, but it closely parallels Eve and Charlie's circumstances and extends the novel's uncertainty beyond Eve's institutionalized perspective.