The Last House Guest(61)

“Avery—” he said, but I got up first, scooping up my clothes, so I wouldn’t have to hear the excuse. I walked straight for the attached bathroom, so I wouldn’t have to see the regret on his face. Stood in the bathroom that was still damp from when I’d cleaned the mess of towels and water earlier in the night with Parker.

I waited until Connor had enough time to get changed, to leave. He knocked once on the bathroom door, but I didn’t respond. I turned on the shower, pretending I hadn’t heard. Kept staring into the mirror, trying to see beneath the fog to the person I had become.

When I finally stepped outside, he was gone. I didn’t know where he went after that. Couldn’t find him in the sea of faces all blurring together in the living room.

I imagined him driving back to see Sadie, telling her. I imagined her finding out what I had done. What I would say: You never told me you were with him. Sorry, a shrug, didn’t know. Or: I was drunk—absolving myself. He didn’t complain—to hurt her. Or the truth: Connor Harlow is not for you. What I should’ve said long ago: Don’t.

Don’t forget that I once burned my own life to the ground piece by piece. Don’t think I won’t do it again.

Everything’s easier the second time around.

It was then, as I was running this conversation through my mind—all the things I would say to her, my resolve tightening, strengthening—that Parker caught my gaze over the crowd, tipping his head toward the front door. Warning me.

Two men in the open doorway, hats in their hands.

The police were here after all.





SUMMER


?????2018





CHAPTER 21


I paced a circle in the living room of the Sea Rose, phone held to my ear. All the information fighting for space. My grandmother’s account. The way Sadie and I had met, even. Everything was shifting.

Connor’s line kept ringing, and I hung up just as the call went to voicemail. He’d be working now, even though it was Sunday. People need to eat. What he’d always say when we were younger, when I was annoyed by his hours and his commitment to them.

The ocean was an addiction for him—a shudder rolling through him, like that first sip of alcohol coursing through the bloodstream.

I locked the front door to the Sea Rose when I left, but I brought the flash drive with me, scared to have it out of my possession. It was the closest I’d felt to Sadie since her death. My footsteps tracing her path, my hands where hers had been. My mind struggling to keep up.

All the secrets she’d never shared with me—but she had been wrong about this one. If she’d asked, I would’ve told her: I was not a Loman.

I would’ve explained that I looked like my mother, yes, with the dark hair and the olive skin, but my eyes were my father’s. That my mother stopped here and put down roots not for that thing she was chasing, as she claimed, but because she met a guy, a teacher, and he was so earnest in his beliefs, so sure this was the place he belonged and that he was doing the thing he was meant to be doing. And his earnestness made her drop her guard, see the world through his eyes: that nothing would happen that hadn’t been planned—and then she ended up pregnant with me.

It was not a perfect marriage, not a perfect life. It was always there, in the unspoken places of every argument—the reason she had stayed. The life she was living and the one she seemed to be searching for still.

She had given the last fourteen years of her life to my father, and Littleport, and me. They did not have money, I knew, because it was in their arguments, voiced aloud. The line between art and commerce. The side hustle. My mom worked in the gallery where her paintings hung, made more behind the cash register than behind the easel.

I remembered my dad dropping me off once at the gallery in the summer when I was young, on his way to go tutor. My mom stood behind the counter, and she seemed surprised to see us there. You were supposed to be home by now, he’d said. Her face was pinched, confused. We could use the overtime, she’d said. Then, looking down at me, her face slipping, Sorry, I forgot.

There was no hush money coming in. There was no strain of a man in the shadows.

There was only me, running free in the woods behind our home, learning to swim against a cold current, with the buoy of salt water. Sledding headfirst down Harbor Drive before the plows came through, believing this world was mine, mine, mine.

My way of seeing the world, to my mother’s disappointment, was always more like my father’s—pragmatic and unbending. It was why I was so sure she would’ve loved Sadie. Here was someone who could look at me and see something else, something new.

Only now I understood what Sadie believed she was seeing that very first time.

Six years, she must’ve thought she knew who I was. Parading me around her house, taunting her parents with it, claiming me as her own. A dig at her mother; a power move with her father. Six years, and she’d finally discovered the truth.

At the start of her last summer, she’d bought two of those commercial DNA test kits that report your genealogy while also screening for a bunch of preexisting diseases. Just to be sure, she’d said. We’ll feel so much better after. Who knows, maybe we have some long-lost relatives in common.

I was hesitant. As much as I liked to track things forward and backward step by step, I didn’t know if I wanted to see something like that coming. Something untreatable, an inevitability that I had no power to stop. But how did one say no to Sadie, sitting across from you on the bed of your house that was really her house, really her bed? Spitting into a test tube until my mouth was dry, my throat parched. Handing over the very core of my being.