The Last House Guest(46)

When everyone reconvened at the Lomans’ stately brick-front home after the service, there was an odd familiarity to it, like something I almost knew. Maybe it was the way Bianca had decorated, a similar footprint to the homes. Or a familiar scent. The background of photos throughout the years that had pieced together subconsciously in my mind. So that I could open a door and know what would be there in the second before it was revealed. On my right, the coat closet. The third door on the left down the hall would be the bathroom, and it would be a shade of almost blue.

I believe that a person can become possessed by someone else—at least in part. That one life can slip inside another, giving it shape. In this way, I could judge Sadie’s reaction before it occurred, picture an expression in the second before she shared it. It was how I could anticipate what she would do before she did it, because I believed I understood how she thought, and the push and pull that would lead her to any given moment—except her final ones.

As I moved through the house, the only person I suspected could see that possession in me was Luce, standing beside Parker on the other side of the living room, glass in hand, watching me closely. Ever since Parker had introduced us when they pulled up in the drive that summer, she’d been watching me. At first, I thought, because she didn’t understand my history with the Lomans and therefore Parker. But lately, I felt it was something else: that she could sense things from a remove. As if there was something I had believed invisible that only she could see clearly.

Parker leaned down to whisper something in her ear, and she flinched, distracted. Her face was stoic as she turned to face him, and I used the moment to slip away, taking the steps to the second-story landing. The hallway was bright and airy, even with the darker wood floors and closed doors. I knew as soon as I put my hand on the knob, second one down the hall, that this room was hers.

But the inside was so different than I’d imagined. There were relics from childhood lingering, like the horse figurines on a high shelf. Photos tucked into the edge of her dresser mirror—a group of girls I might’ve seen downstairs. Sadie had spent her high school years at a boarding school and summers in Littleport. Her room was as temporary a place as any, filled with the things left behind, never fully growing with the person who returned to it each time.

Her quilt was designed in bursts of color—purple, blue, green—the opposite of her bed in Littleport, which was all in shades of ivory. She hadn’t been here since before the start of the summer season, but I kept searching for some sign of her, something left behind that could fill the void she once occupied.

I ran my hand over the ridges of wood grain on the surface of her dresser. Then over the jewelry box, monogrammed with her initials, painted peach on white. Beside it, a pewter tree was positioned in front of the mirror, its branches bare and craggy, meant to display jewelry in a child’s room. A single necklace hung from the farthest point. The pendant was rose gold, a swirling, delicate S, and set with a fine trail of diamonds. I closed my fist around it and felt the edges poking into the flesh of my palm.

“I always knew you were a thief.”

I saw her in the mirror first, pale and unmoving, like a ghost. I spun around, releasing the necklace, coming face-to-face with Bianca. She stood in the doorway; her black sheath dress hit just below her knees, but she was barefoot. Her toes flexed while I watched.

“I was just looking,” I said, panicked. Trying desperately to hold on to something that I could feel slipping away.

She swayed slightly in the doorway, her face fracturing, like she was overcome—picturing Sadie here, seeing me instead, in her daughter’s room, in her daughter’s dress. But then I wasn’t sure—whether she was the one moving or whether it was me. She looked so pale, I thought if I blinked, she might fade away into the bone-colored walls.

“Where does your money go? I wonder,” she said, shifting on her feet, the hardwood popping beneath her soles. I could feel the mood shifting, the room changing—a new way to channel her grief. “You make a living wage directly from us. You have no bills, no expenses, and I know exactly what we paid for your grandmother’s place.” She took a step into the room, then another, and I felt the edge of the dresser pressing into my back. “You may have had my husband fooled, but not me. I saw exactly what you were from the start.”

“Bianca, I’m sorry, but—”

She put a hand out, cutting me off. “No. You don’t get to talk anymore. You don’t get to roam my house—my house—as if it’s your own.” Her eyes caught on a photo of Sadie, wedged into the corner of the mirror. Her finger hovered just over her daughter’s smile. “She saved you, you know. Told Grant that stealing the money was her idea, that she was the only one responsible. But I know better.” Her hand moved to the necklace, the delicate S, enclosing it in her palm.

I set my jaw. Bianca was wrong. She believed I had stolen from their company, taken Sadie’s job, let her take the fall for it, but it wasn’t true.

In mid-July, over a month before Sadie’s death, I’d been reconciling the rental property finances when I realized the numbers didn’t line up. That money had gone missing, systematically and quietly, and had never been flagged.

For a brief moment, I considered asking Sadie about it first. But I worried I was being set up—all summer I’d felt she’d been holding me at a distance. It was the reminder that everything in my life was so fleeting, so fragile. That nothing so good could last.