When the dead refuse to rest, sometimes it's because they have unfinished business. Sometimes it's because someone won't let them go.

Dr. Emma Hartwell thought she understood trauma. As a grief counselor in Portland, she'd spent years helping clients process their darkest memories. But when she inherits a Victorian house in Salem, Oregon from her estranged aunt Margaret, Emma discovers that some memories refuse to stay buried—literally.

The house doesn't just hold memories; it hungers for them. For decades, Margaret had been conducting secret psychological experiments, extracting traumatic memories from victims and feeding them to the house's insatiable appetite. Now those memories have taken on lives of their own, manifesting as ghostly echoes that plague both the house and the surrounding neighborhood.

Trapped within the walls are the consciousness fragments of Margaret's victims—people who came seeking help for their trauma, only to have their very essence stolen and imprisoned. Sarah Chen relives her fatal car accident every night in the kitchen. The Blackwood children's terror echoes through the attic. War veteran James Morrison's fractured memories bleed through the basement walls.

As Emma delves deeper into her family's dark legacy, she uncovers a century-old bloodline of women gifted—or cursed—with the ability to absorb and manipulate human memories. But the Memory Registry, a shadowy government organization, wants to contain the house's power for their own purposes. Dr. Elizabeth Kane seeks to preserve the victims' stories as a historical archive. And the house itself has developed an intelligence of its own, one that has no intention of releasing its collection.

Emma must confront her own buried guilt while helping the trapped souls find peace, but she discovers that destroying the memories might also erase the last traces of the victims who died seeking help. As the boundary between memory and reality dissolves, Emma faces a horrifying choice: burn down the house and destroy the evidence of her aunt's crimes along with the victims' stories, or find a way to give the memories peace while risking her own sanity.