The Last House Guest(53)

Connor’s head drifted to the side as he leaned even closer. “All I see is the letter S.”





CHAPTER 18


Dusk began to settle on the ride back. All I could think about, with the thin towel wrapped around me, was the shape of the tattoo. The shape of the S of Sadie’s necklace, left behind in her room in Connecticut. The gold edges lined with diamonds, digging in to my palm.

Do you trust me? she’d asked when she found me waiting for her on the bluffs. And I did. What other choice was there? I had been adrift and alone, and then I chose something else. I chose her. That day, she drove us straight up the coast to the tattoo parlor. She’d had the design ready, something she had thought about all winter, I had believed. Something that would be permanently etched onto both our bodies, bonding us together—for infinity, or as long as our bodies should last.

How many times had I felt another person tracing the lines, told them with confidence: Nothing lasts forever. Meaning: Not you, not me, not this.

I believed it had bonded me not only to Sadie but to my place in the world. Given me a purpose, a reminder.

But the necklace. The one I’d found when Bianca caught me in Sadie’s room—I strained to see it clearly in my memory—the looping S, the edges curling toward each other—

Connor cut the boat sharply to the right, so I had to grip the railing. All that remained were Connor’s warning words—and this creeping realization that maybe I had branded myself not with a promise of who I would be but who she was from the start.

I gripped the jewelry box tight in my hand as we veered away from the mouth of the harbor, where the water funneled and calmed all at once. We were heading north, toward open sea.

“What are you doing?” I called to his back, but my words were swallowed up by the wind.

Connor kept the boat heading diagonally, and as the sun dipped below the bluffs in the distance, I knew exactly what he was doing. He cut the engine abruptly, and I leaned forward from the change in momentum. Not Connor, though. He never broke stride as he walked across the boat, dropping into the seat beside me.

My ears buzzed from the change of equilibrium—the sudden stillness, without the raging wind. We were at the whim of the current, the creaking of the hull below us as we moved untethered in the waves. In the distance, on the bluffs, one house grew brighter as the sky turned a dusty blue, plummeting to night.

“I remember sitting here at night with you,” Connor said, feet up and crossed at the ankles. “So I think if anyone should be asking questions here, it’s me.”

I gestured my free hand toward him, trying to keep it from shaking. “It was a long time ago, Connor.”

“So,” he said, “was it everything you imagined?”

I shook my head. “It’s not like that.”

“No? It’s not everything you hoped it would be?”

“No, I mean, it’s not what you’re thinking.”

Those summers when we were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, sometimes at night, we’d take his dad’s boat from the harbor, just beyond the bluffs. Anchored here, far enough offshore, you could watch them in the dark, and no one could see you doing it.

They weren’t close enough to see clearly, but it was enough: The girl in the upper-right window, staring out. Shadows behind the screens. Bodies moving in time to some rhythm we couldn’t understand, on opposite sides of a door. On opposite ends of the house. Every light on, every shade pulled open—they were a beacon in the night, calling us closer.

She sees us, I’d said, so sure from the way she was standing there, looking out.

Not possible, Connor had promised. The light from the boat was out. We were invisible, as we were taught to be.

If I lived there, I wouldn’t spend all day staring out.

If I lived there, I’d hang some curtains already, he said, laughing.

We watched their lives from a distance. Imagining what they were doing, what they were thinking. We were captivated by them.

So when Connor asked if it was everything I hoped it would be, I knew what he was thinking—that I had wormed my way into their lives, become the thing I once only imagined.

I could almost forgive him the implication. The tattoo on my body, the way I was living up there. The way I seemed to slide into her life. I was following the ghost of her footsteps even now. “It was a coincidence that we met,” I said. “She walked in on me in the bathroom when I was working. Evelyn hired me.” It was what I’d always believed until Erica told me someone from the Loman house had requested me to work that party. But that didn’t make sense.

“And yet,” he said.

And yet here we were again, in a place we hadn’t been together in years. “Did you ever see me in there?” I wondered then if he had continued on without me.

He cut his eyes to me briefly, but he didn’t move his head. “I don’t watch people, Avery. I’ve got better things to do.”

“Then what the hell are we doing here now?”

“Because I was a suspect until a note was found, and I’ve been living under a cloud for almost a year. I’m sick of it. I don’t know what’s the truth anymore.”

I blinked slowly, taking a steady breath. “I don’t know anything more than you do. I’m the one who told you about the phone.”