We Were Never Here

by Sophia Hannan

Genres: YA Paranormal; Young Adult

Synopsis

The remaining members of a ghost hunting show return to the haunted manor that may have killed their friend in this atmospheric, contemporary gothic debut perfect for fans of She Is a Haunting and Delicious Monsters.

Four teens went into the manor, three came out.

In July, Georgia Perry and Jules Park—secret girlfriends, covert art thieves, and cohosts of a popular YouTube ghost hunting show—step into a haunted house to steal a priceless painting. A few short hours later, there’s a knife in Jules’s chest and Georgia is waking up in a pool of blood with no painting and no memory of how she got there.

Now it’s October, and Georgia is underwater. She hasn’t been to class in weeks, and she’s avoiding her old crew—and only friends—like the plague. But when the three remaining thieves get a call from the man who paid a hefty sum to keep them out of jail, demanding that they return to finish the job, Georgia has no choice but to return to her old life.

As the estranged friends scramble to steal the painting with no cover story and no leader, they quickly realize that something is very, very wrong, and it’s not just the suffocating memory of Jules or the prying eyes of their viewers. Between the strange shadows that begin to trail them and the nightmares plaguing Georgia’s sleep, only one thing is certain: Something followed them home from De Lys manor, and it will do anything to keep them from going back.

Release date: July 28, 2026

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter One: Georgia CHAPTER ONE Georgia
Georgia was beginning to accept that Jules’s blood was never coming out of her white Converse. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t try, though. She stood at the bathroom sink, rubbing her hands raw against the darkly stained canvas. All the soapy water did was singe and sting her skin where it had been scraped, hot enough to scald her fingers.

The timer went off. She forced herself to stop, a little disbelieving that it had already been an hour. She’d had to do this more and more often lately, setting alarms so that she would not mindlessly complete the same task for hours on end. Time flitted from her like a fish in murky water, there and then not.

It didn’t help that Jules’s blood was permanent now. It had been left to fester too long in the weeks after her death, and now the shoes were not merely stained—blood was as much a part of them as the laces, the canvas, the worn rubber sole.

They were the first purchase Georgia had made with her own money, and she regretted allowing them to be ruined. She’d chucked everything else she’d been wearing that night, so they’d already received better treatment than the rest of her clothes. Perhaps it was that these shoes had memories from before. She looked at them and remembered fragments of the night Jules died, the few memories she was able to hold on to, but she also saw herself in the ninth grade, holding the shoes up and admiring the pristine fabric. She saw herself before she’d ever hunted a ghost or stolen a painting or kissed a girl at all.

She saw Jules’s body sprawled on the hardwood floor of De Lys Manor, knife wound still weeping.

Nobody knew exactly what had killed Jules Park, only that it was bloody. If Jules were here, she would have told Georgia ghosts, which was her answer for everything. The difference now was that Georgia might believe her.

She turned off the alarm and pocketed her phone, ignoring the messages that popped onto the screen. She ought to disable them for the YouTube channel. And Instagram, and Twitter. All from unfamiliar names, people who spoke like they knew her. I’m so upset, they wrote, you guys were my favorites. I can’t believe the show is over. I’ve been watching it for so long—

They flooded in, endless. Georgia couldn’t blame them. She couldn’t even stop herself from reading. Before their comment section had turned into a funeral guestbook, they’d been a mirror. She didn’t remember when the viewers got to know them so well, only that when they started commenting that Georgia’s gaze seemed to linger on Jules too long, she looked at the girl next to her and found that they were right.

She should have written what the alarm was for on her arm. This task was done, but she could not fathom the next one. Perhaps she should be in the classes they were paying so much tuition for, the classes she needed if she wanted to graduate, but even those felt pointless. She’d sent a long email to each of her teachers explaining her situation and providing a psychiatrist’s note that allowed her to avoid their attendance standards for the semester. Circe had insisted on writing it for her back in August, because if it had been up to Georgia, it would simply have said:

Hello,

I went into an (allegedly) haunted house a few months ago with my internet-famous secret girlfriend, passed out, and when I woke up most of her blood was no longer in her body (think Stephen King’s Carrie). Please don’t make me hand stuff in on time.

Georgia Perry

It would have done the trick, but Circe was too highly strung to let her hand it in like that. She’d used fancy words like “lamentably” and “harrowing,” which her biology teachers likely didn’t appreciate as much as Circe believed they would, but it worked. It did sound more professional that way.

Georgia tried not to think about Circe almost as much as she tried not to think about that night, but Circe was harder to ignore; she’d followed Georgia here. De Lys Manor had not. Georgia often caught Circe taking the long way across campus to pass by the dorm, scanning the windows. James, at least, was polite enough to avoid Georgia, even if he wasn’t any easier to forget.

He was a little like the shoes. He’d existed before Jules and was just as stained. Sometimes Georgia found herself reaching for him, but her arm always froze, her fist closing too early around nothing. Earlier in the summer, she’d almost felt the cotton of his shirt on her fingertips. Now, air. Her own nails digging into her palms. She’d stopped trying.

They were all supposed to live at Umber, in Shelley Hall, but here Georgia was, alone. Wherever Jules had ended up, she was definitely disappointed. They’d managed to thoroughly ruin every aspect of her plan: The Lady, Drowned was still at De Lys, the money they were supposed to be paid for retrieving her still sitting in Lark’s pockets instead of paying their tuition at Umber. Even the show had come to a horrible, sputtering stop, and they were left in the most haunted town in the Midwest with nothing to film.

That plan had been her future once, but now it coated her hands like blood.

What am I supposed to be doing right now? she asked herself. Where do I need to go? Whatever had stabbed Jules must have gotten Georgia’s frontal lobe, too, because her short-term memory seemed to be on a prolonged leave of absence. The therapist that her parents had sent her to over the summer said it was a manifestation of grief. Georgia thought that her memory might keep fading and fading until she didn’t even remember Jules. It could be nice, reverting to who she was before they met. That ninth-grade version of Georgia had certainly been happier. Stupider, too.

She’d always been stupid, though. Jules was the plotter. She was the one who made the operation work, especially the parts that they hid from everyone but themselves. It was a cruel joke that she’d been the one to die, because if they got caught, she was the only person with enough wit to get them out of it.

If you wanted to kill an animal, wouldn’t you go for the head?

Both time and space had fled from her now, and Georgia blinked back into consciousness at a closed bedroom door that looked like hers but wasn’t. Who had watched her walk mindlessly down the hall until there was nowhere farther to go? Had anyone tried to stop her? Sometimes, the fear of being caught ate her alive, gnawing on her littlest rib bone while she tried to sleep.

Unsteadily, Georgia shoved the feeling away and turned the knob. The hinges creaked, a sliver of light widening into the room that was meant to be Jules’s, which was technically occupied but rarely locked. She half expected to see that familiar rotting face looking up at her from the laundry-covered floor, waiting to be found.

She turned, wondering what Jules would have done with the place if she’d had the chance to move in. Where would she have hidden her journal, put up her posters? How would she have adjusted her blinds so that the sun could filter in, but not enough that it would wake her up on weekends? Georgia didn’t know, and didn’t know, and didn’t know.

The Lady, Drowned wasn’t here, and neither were any of Jules’s things. She was in the past, along with De Lys. The painting was what Jules had been hunting all along, not the ghosts. It had never really been about the ghosts, but now they were all that was left.

Georgia shut the door.