Have you ever moved into a house or apartment and felt the presence of those who lived there before you?

In “The Apartment,” by Ana Menéndez, such curiosity blooms into an evocative and emotionally powerful novel. Its chapters could stand alone as short stories, but Menéndez links them by setting all of them in the same place, Apartment 2B in the Helena, a two-story building on Miami Beach. Within that nondescript two-bedroom, one-bath unit in a building that went up in the early 1940s, she sets some of the most dramatic moments of her characters’ lives.

After a brief idyllic prologue set in the precolonial past, where an Indigenous woman gathers turtle eggs on the wild barrier island that will, a few centuries later, be Miami Beach, the book moves to 1942. Sophie Appleton is a young bride from Texas, brimming with enthusiasm for setting up her own household and madly in love with Major Jack Appleton.

The Helena, so new it’s not quite finished, has become officers’ quarters, and Sophie happily spends her time decorating 2B while Jack is training recruits. But the war’s consequences creep closer.

In 1982, Isabel, a young artist’s model, strikes a tiny blow for independence when she defies the orders of her older lover, an artist who has ensconced her in 2B, not to go out without him.

In 2002, 2B’s tenants are Ignacio, his wife, Maribel, and his girlfriend, Beatrice. Maribel is Cuban and so has citizenship, while Ignacio, a Colombian, and Beatrice, a Haitian, do not.

Eight years later, a 40-year-old journalist owns 2B. She’s bitterly packing to move in with her parents after a divorce. She rents the place to a young Cuban man with the unlikely name Lenin Garcia, whose life we will learn about in heartbreaking detail in the final chapter, when a woman named Lana moves into 2B.

Menéndez has slowly, subtly turned “The Apartment” into a ghost story, and both the living and the dead at the Helena will surround Lana in an eerily beautiful dance.

DETAILS “The Apartment” by Ana Menéndez; Counterpoint (227 pages, $27)