Ruby meets Marcus Dean, the property's inheritor, who explains the impossible truth: the Victorian house exists across multiple timelines, shifting between realities due to mechanisms created by his ancestor Ephraim Dean. As Ruby and Marcus grow closer, she learns his parents disappeared when the house "slipped" twenty years ago, and he's been searching for them since. When the house prepares to shift again during a nor'easter, they use Ephraim's navigator device to attempt contact with his parents. They briefly glimpse them before the house stabilizes, but surprisingly, Marcus's mother Eleanor appears-forty years older, having lived in another timeline where her husband didn't survive. As they investigate lighthouse records from 1962, they discover the house's pattern of timeline shifts and a key to Ephraim's cabinet containing letters addressed to Eleanor from across time.
