Every light, lock, speaker, and camera says she is safe.

Clover lives inside the kind of house other people save to moodboards: converted stone, warm floors, glass facing the Devon sea, a kitchen that wakes before she does.

Her husband built the system before she moved in. It learns her routines, keeps the doors locked, and turns the heat up before she is cold. It notices when she sleeps badly.

Then the house begins to show her things it shouldn't know.

A name she buried five years ago, spoken aloud by a kitchen speaker. A photograph of a child no algorithm should be able to find. A forged medical alert that sends her driving through the dark. Every time she reports what she's seen, the system shows nothing, and her husband asks if she's been sleeping.

The house is the only witness to what the house is doing.

Resident 2

The house knows who she used to be.

Clover is pregnant, newly married, and trying hard to believe in the version of her life that looks like the house. She keeps a paper calendar on the fridge and a plug-in kettle on the counter, two small stubbornnesses in a kitchen that wants everything synced. She also has a past she changed her name to get away from.

Every time she reports it

The system: Shows nothing.
Her husband: Asks if she has been sleeping.
Clover: Knows what she heard.

Objects from the novel

The hum

A low frequency in the walls and floors. So constant the body starts mistaking it for quiet.

The locked study

The one door in the house that does not open for her.

The paper calendar

Her handwriting, pinned to the fridge. A record the house cannot correct.

The kettle

Plug-in, dumb, hers. The one thing in the kitchen that does only what she tells it.

From the first chapter

It's the mornings I notice most, the small gap before the house catches up to me. Three seconds, four at a push. My eyes open in the dark and there's nothing. No hum, no click from the speaker on the nightstand, no soft blue glow, nothing in the room saying I'm being attended to. And then the house remembers. The heating sighs on. The hall lights come up. Down in the kitchen the grinder starts, because it knows Beckett takes his coffee at seven, and never mind that Beckett drove up to London last night. The grinder doesn't know he's gone. It goes on performing the rite for a man who's left the building, and I lie there and listen to it, and I find it almost sweet, the loyalty of the thing.
From Chapter 1, Mind How You Go

A marriage thriller, with a house in it.

The house does what it was built to do, for the person who built it.

Care and surveillance use the same vocabulary. So does Beckett.

Whoever controls the house controls the record of what happened in it.

In the tradition of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These, a psychological thriller with the prose and moral complexity of literary fiction. A novel about what it means to be known by a system that was built to keep you.

October 23, 2026

Be first inside the house.

Pre-order Mind How You Go now, or sign up for launch news and sample chapters.

Pre-order now

Amazon store