Take the Key and Lock Her Up (Embassy Row #3)(8)

“I need to keep my kid sister alive, is what I need to do. Even if she’s dead set against it.”

I wish he were joking, but he’s not. I wish he were wrong, but Jamie is never wrong. Ever.

“I just …”

The town is a few miles away, and I glance in that direction, unsure of what I’ll see.

“I know, Gracie.” Jamie’s voice is soft and understanding. He’s maybe the only person in the world who has some idea why I’m out here in the dark, what has called me to this place.

“I need to see it,” I say.

“Okay,” Jamie says, no longer fighting. “Tomorrow we’ll tell Dominic we need to make a pit stop. He won’t like it, but—”

“Tonight,” I say. “Alone. I need to see it alone.”

But Jamie’s already shaking his head. “Alone isn’t an option.”

“No.” I’m not shouting, but I want to. “You saw it after, didn’t you? Well, not me. I was …”

Tied up. Locked up. Dying.

Jamie doesn’t need me to say any more. When my brother walks closer, every step is a struggle. He’s going on steam and sheer force of will. He should be in a hospital. At the very least a rehab center or that motel bed. But he’s not going back. Not without me. He just drags himself to the Buick and reaches for the door.

“You drive.”

It’s been almost five years since we moved here, since Dad surprised our mom with a little white house in town. Since they sat Jamie and me down and explained that Fort Sill would be Dad’s last post, our last stop. But it wasn’t the end, our parents told us. No. It was the beginning.

But of what we had no idea at the time.

“It’s up here,” Jamie tells me. I turn the Buick off the highway and onto a street that is bathed in the yellow glow of streetlights. They’re so different from the gaslights of Adria; their light doesn’t flicker. The fire inside them doesn’t burn. Everything around me feels too foreign, too new. The town is small, even by US standards, and it feels like we’re a world away from Embassy Row.

It’s the dead of night, but morning comes early in an Army town, and I know the streets won’t stay empty for long. A few lights shine inside the cute little shops on Main Street, but there is one shop that stands in darkness—like a string of Christmas lights with one blown bulb, a solitary dark spot, fading into the night.

That is where I park. And sit. And stare.

“We don’t have to get out,” Jamie tells me.

I turn off the Buick. “Yes. I do.”

I honestly don’t know what I expected to see. It’s been three years, after all. “It’s still …” I start, easing closer to the brick walls, a burned-out shell of what used to be one woman’s dream.

“Dad never sold it,” Jamie says. “He hired a crew to come in and clean it up, remove the debris and make it safe if kids should wander in or something. But yeah. It’s still the same. I think he … I think he was afraid to change anything without her permission, you know? It’s still hers. In his mind, it will always be hers.”

I remember the first time our mother ever brought us here. She made us stand across the street with our eyes closed until she yelled, “Ta-da!” Then we opened them to find her standing in front of an old hardware store, her arms thrown out as if she was showing us a palace.

A palace …

Suddenly, I’m shaking. My blood is pounding too hard in my veins. Jamie is no longer beside me, and I’m alone on the street, looking through the window at the smoke that fills the shop. I’m screaming out my mother’s name, watching a man I’ve never seen lay her body on the wooden floor.

Cases line the walls, full of old clocks and crystal vases, dolls and watches and books—so many books. And when the man sees me, I yell. I scream. A bag lies at my feet. Shiny metal peeks out from the depths, and I reach for the gun. I reach for the gun, and—

“Gracie. Gracie!”

Jamie is squeezing me, holding me tight.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” His fingers are in my hair, pushing my face toward his broad shoulder, muffling my screams.

The flames are gone and the night is clear, but I swear that I can still smell the smoke. It hasn’t been three years. It isn’t over. A part of me wants to lunge through the place where the door used to hang, run back through time to that night, to stop the stupid girl I was. But it’s too late.

Inside, the wide wooden floorboards are sturdy but covered in dust. The roof is still standing, and the old tin tiles on the ceiling are now charred and stained with soot. Mom loved those tiles. She spent hours sanding and scraping and painting them to shiny white perfection. But nothing about our family will ever be perfect again.

“Every now and then Dad talks about selling it, but …”

I get it, even if Jamie can’t put it into words. There are some books you can never get rid of, even if you don’t like the ending.

It’s not a shop anymore; it’s a grave. There is nothing alive within it, and it can’t hurt me. I know this, but when I close my eyes, I hear the crackling of the fire, the shattering of the glass.

I shake and I want to scream, but most of all I want to wake up in my old bed and find that the past three years were nothing but a very bad dream.