When Maria Sanchez inherits her uncle's dilapidated Victorian house, she arrives broken—freshly divorced, professionally adrift, and convinced she belongs nowhere. What she finds is 847 Meridian Street: a sanctuary that has always gathered the uninvited. The feral marmalade cat with one ear. The hardware store clerk with the shattered pelvis and clouded eye. The hospice nurse dying of cancer who brings letters from the dead. The ghost of Arthur's late wife Solene, who lives in every carefully labeled jar and stopped clock. Arthur was autistic. He felt everything at full volume and built this house for people like him—too sensitive, too strange, too much for a world that demands conformity. Now Maria must learn his final lesson: that the guests we don't invite—disability, divorce, death itself—often become what we love most fiercely. As the house fills with the displaced and the different, Maria discovers that survival isn't about fitting the shape provided, but building a world spacious enough for your specific, unrepeatable self. A poignant meditation on neurodivergence, chronic illness, and the families we forge from strangers, what it means to truly witness another
