The Last House Guest(59)

It wasn’t only the routing number that matched. It was the account. One of the account numbers, one of the recipients of this money—it was my grandmother’s.

The room spun.

“Wait.” I said it out loud, though I didn’t know whom I was talking to. Just. Wait.

Every family has secrets, Avery. Connor had said those very words last night, but I had never considered my own.

Erica’s words in my living room—that Sadie had requested me by name. I had never considered that this could be true. Never stopped to think what could’ve drawn her to me in the first place.

But here it was.

I pushed back from the table, reimagining the scene. The bathroom. Sadie turning around, finding me there. The red creeping up her neck.

Had she known, all along, I was in there?

The slip of the blade. The toilet paper pressed to the blood.

Don’t hurt yourself. She had said that so clearly, so earnestly, when I’d stood too close to the edge.

As if, from the start, she had known.

She had seen me in the kitchen of her house. Followed me. Known what I had done.

Later, she’d found that journal, and she knew the hidden things I dreamed and feared. Keeping it all a secret for herself.

What did she want with me? Did she know I’d once sneaked into her house? Shimmied inside with Faith and Connor?

Or that I had watched from Connor’s boat, staring in those big portrait windows—her life, her body, that I wanted to inhabit?

She had sought me out on the beach after, inviting me back. Into her home, into her life. Welcoming me—

Or. Or.

Something that belonged to her. Oh. Oh, no. No, Sadie.

Bringing me to dinner, watching her parents’ faces, the stiff expressions. Her guileless smile. Do you see me now?

A sad story to share: Look what has become of this girl. No family, nowhere to live. Won’t you help? Grant’s voice when they offered me the guesthouse: It’s the right thing to do.

The ink on my body, same as hers, the shape of an S—I have found you, and you belong, here, with me.

Don’t, she said when her brother walked by.

She believed I was the secret. And, like the locals would gossip, she planted me right out in the open. Look what I have found. Look what I have done.

She believed I was a Loman.





SUMMER


?????2017





The Plus-One Party


10:30 p.m.

The threat of the police was now a distant, alcohol-infused memory. As much a nonconcern as the power outage, or stepping into the pool, or your secrets exposed for all to hear over a game at the kitchen island. The second round had begun.

I had been waiting to see what Parker would do after the scene upstairs—Luce spilling out of the room, tinged with the remnants of anger. Of violence.

Parker never played the game, I realized. Never had his secrets exposed for all to hear. Not in all the years I’d known him. Always too busy hopping from person to person.

Or maybe the rest of us were scared of him. What he would do. There were enough rumors about his past, his reckless teenage years. How he had gotten into fights—that’s what Sadie said. He had the scar, and the gleam in his eye, to prove that he used to have a wild streak. Which, unlike mine, only added to his appeal now that it was gone. But there was an understanding that it had existed, and therefore still existed, somewhere at his core.

Parker finally rounded the corner from the front foyer, alone. He saw me watching and paused. Then he redirected his path, coming to stand beside me at the entrance of the kitchen, his hands restless without a drink to hold. He cracked his knuckles one by one. I imagined them in the shape of a fist.

“What happened up there?” I asked, nodding toward the front foyer, where the staircase was tucked just out of sight.

He scanned the room instead, ignoring the question. “Where is she?” This was not the type of place where you could call a cab or an Uber and get home. Luce was stuck here.

Parker stepped away from me, into the crowd.

“Parker,” I said, loud enough to get his attention—on the cusp of making a scene. “What the hell happened? I heard something. I heard you guys.”

He looked at me curiously, his eyes shimmering, the scar through his eyebrow reflecting the light overhead. “She’s drunk. She’ll cool off.”

Like there was a hot, simmering rage in all of us. I laughed. “You want me to believe that Luce—Luce—is the one to blame?”

I tried to picture it. Luce, in her heels, throwing something against the wall. Or barreling into him, knocking him backward. Luce, uncontained.

He inhaled slowly. “Believe what you want. I don’t care.” Like my thoughts were inconsequential. Because his was the story that would matter, that would count.

I spotted her through the patio doors, sitting in a chair beside the pool, the glow from the underwater lights turning her skin a sickly pale. Her shoes were kicked off and her legs tucked up underneath her. Parker seemed to spot her at the same time. He started walking, but I reached for his elbow. “Did she see?” I asked. Meaning us. In the bathroom.

Parker flinched. “Did she see what?” he asked, like I was not permitted to mention things that had happened in the past. That it was up to him to decide whether something existed or not; that the narrative of his life was no one’s business but his own, and he could erase it at will.