There was once three neighbors, their names were Fear, Wisdom and Deception. Every day, each would wake up, and have a conversation with someone walking by, trying to get them to come inside, but each would say something different. Fear would come first, and call out, “come in here, and be safe, you have no idea what is coming ahead, you could trip and die, or break a leg.” Next came out wisdom who would say, “Come in, and eat something, and sit down for a second, that you may be prepared for the journey ahead.” Finally came out Deception, who would declare, “Enter into my house, and have riches for the rest of your life, and rule over the land, never having to return to work, and never falling ill.” Almost every body would stop, at one house or another, but only the ones who came to the house of Wisdom left truly happy.

Fear had not always carried such a name. Once, long ago, she was simply Juniper. Juniper Frye, the pastor's daughter who skipped home from school and weaved wildflowers into her bike basket. She carried on this way until she was 15.

It was the summer her father's church burned down.

No one knew how it started. The investigators said it was electrical, an old building with old wiring, but Juniper had been the last one inside that evening, and for the rest of her life she would carry the quiet, unverifiable suspicion that she had left a candle burning. She never said this to anyone. The thought said itself to her, every morning, before she had even fully woken.

Her father rebuilt, as faithful men do. He smiled and said it was God's will and accepted the lumber donations from three towns over. But Juniper watched him age a decade in a single year, watched the colour leave his hair the way light leaves a room in winter, seemingly gradual until you are plunged into greyness at 5pm. She learned something that summer that the hymns had never taught her: that terrible things did not announce themselves in any amount of hellfire or curled horns.

She grew careful after that.

First it was reasonable things. She checked the stove twice before leaving the house. She kept a candle snuffer on her person at all times, a small brass one on a chain, like a strange locket. The girls at school found this amusing. Juniper found their amusement beside the point. Soon, she stopped riding her bike, because wheels could catch on a groove in the road and send you over the handlebars. She stopped swimming in the lake outside town, because lakes had no visible bottom and no visible bottom meant anything could be waiting there. She began to map, in a small leather journal she kept under her pillow, all the ways a given Tuesday could go wrong. She filled the journal by autumn.

She bought another.

By the time she was twenty, she had stopped going to most places, slowly, in the way the colour had left her father's hair. First she stopped going to the dance hall on Friday evenings. Then to the market on her own. Then to church, which caused a particular grief in her father, though he said very little about it.

By thirty, she had the house.

She had inherited it from an aunt on her mother's side, a practical woman who had died at ninety-one in her own bed, which struck Juniper as the most sensible way to go. The house sat at the edge of the road that led into and out of town, and from the front window Juniper could see everyone who passed. She could see exactly where they were going and exactly what might happen to them if they weren't careful.

"That road floods in the rain," she called out to a young man with a pack on his back. "I'd turn around if I were you."

It wasn't raining. It hadn't rained in two weeks. But the young man slowed his pace and glanced at the sky, and something shifted in Juniper's chest.The relief of finally being understood, or of finally being useful, which to Juniper had become the same thing.

She began to speak to more of them. To warn them about the cold, about the dark, about the sharp curve two miles up the road where a horse had thrown its rider back in 1943. She was not wrong about any of these things, and she had the journal entries to prove it. The road had flooded, once. The curve had claimed its rider, though decades ago. Fear, she would have told you, is what you feel when you love something and understand what the world can do to it.

What she did not quite see, from inside the house, was what she looked like from the road.

She did not see that her warnings had grown longer every year, and her face tighter, and her windows darker, and that the travelers who came inside to be safe often found themselves sitting for hours in dim rooms, hearing about things that had not happened yet and might never happen, while the afternoon light moved across the floorboards and the road outside went on without them.

She did not see that no one left her house any lighter than when they had entered.

She had stopped picking wildflowers long ago, for fear of a dormant bee allergy or rare intolerance to pollen. But it was only when the bicycle rusted away in the back garden, swallowed by grass she no longer tended, that she forgot she had ever been Juniper at all.

After that, she was simply Fear, in a house full of reasonable precautions, waiting at the window for the next person who hadn't yet realized how much danger they were in.

Nor had Deception always been known under such a moniker. The first, of many epithets, was reported to be Liam Donovan, a man who had been raised in comfort, and lived as if no one could be above him.

He was a beautiful child, which did not help.

Beautiful children are told so too often and too early, and what they learn from this is not vanity, exactly, but something that could be mistaken for it. They learn that the world responds to surface. That a smile, correctly deployed, is a kind of currency. That people will extend enormous generosity to a face they find pleasing, and tell themselves afterward that it was the character they admired. Liam learned to smile very young. He learned that if you told someone they were the only one who truly understood you, they would work very hard to go on deserving the compliment.

By twenty-five, he had borrowed money from eleven men and paid back none of them, and each one had considered himself, privately, a fool for expecting otherwise.

By thirty, he had loved four women who all believed, while they loved him, that they were the only one. The heart was not a ledger, he had said. It could not be held to account.

The house came to him in the way most things came to Liam, which is to say that someone gave it to him who probably should not have.

An older gentleman named Harcastle, a retired solicitor with no living family, had taken a liking to Liam over the course of a single winter while Liam listened to his stories and plied him with the implication that it was was a veritable tragedy that a man of such experience had no one to pass it on to. Harcastle had died in the spring, content, and the house had passed to Liam in a will that surprised everyone in the county except Liam himself.

He painted the shutters blue and planted roses along the front gate, full-blooming and opulent. He hung a lamp above the door that cast everything in an amber comfort. Then he stood at the gate and waited for someone worth speaking to.

He was, in the beginning, almost honest. He told the travelers they looked tired, which they usually were. He told them the road ahead was longer than it looked, which it sometimes was. He offered them rest and a hot meal and the particular comfort of being told that their troubles were not of their own making and their fortunes were about to turn, like digging a trench in sand to let the lies come in on high tide. They slipped in gradually, so gradual that Liam himself could not have pointed to the moment the embellishment became invention, as he prepared another kettle of tea for whatever traveller had arrived at his doorstep, speaking of riches that did not exist, drawn from ventures he described in just enough detail to sound plausible and not enough to be verified. He promised that the thing each traveler most wanted, whatever it was he had learned it was in the first three minutes of conversation, was closer than they thought and coming soon.

Most of them stayed longer than they meant to. Some gave him things. Money, occasionally. More often time, which was the thing Liam had always been most skilled at taking, because people rarely noticed it was gone until they were already outside the gate and down the road and the amber lamp was just a warm point of light in the distance.

What Liam did not understand, and perhaps never would, was that a man who has lived long enough inside his own stories begins to lose the ability to distinguish them from the truth.

He had not yet had to watch many of his guests come back.

But the road ran both ways, and some of them were already turning around, and the roses along the gate were beginning to show, in the uncharitable light of morning, just how many of their blooms were paper.