The Last House Guest(66)

“But I saw you. At the service.” Standing beside him, watching me. He’d leaned down to whisper in her ear, and she’d flinched, turning away—

“Yeah, he asked that— Well, he said it wouldn’t look good if we’d broken up the same night his sister died.” She rolled her eyes. “Can you believe it? Even then they were thinking of how things would look. We agreed to keep up appearances until after the service, after everything wound down and I started my job.” She gestured around the room. “Mostly, we just sort of . . . drifted after. There was nothing left to say. I’ve gone out of my way not to cross paths with the Lomans since. So far, I’ve succeeded.”

“I thought you . . . Well, they seemed to really like you. You seemed to like them.”

She laughed then, unexpectedly. “Sure. They seem like a lot of things.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, considering me. A nervous habit I’d never noticed before. “Have you ever played chess?”

My father had, but his set had disappeared after that first move, and I didn’t know how to play, really. “You think they’re playing a game?” I asked.

She ran her hand back over her hair, down the ponytail. “I think they are the game, Avery. Bishops and knights. Kings and queens. Pawns.”

I lost the thread, lost the metaphor. “You think you were a pawn?” Or maybe it was me she was talking about.

She pressed her lips together, not answering. “They will sacrifice anything for the king.”

I remembered what Grant had taught me—that you had to be willing to risk in order to win. That you had to be willing to part with something. You had to be ready to lose.

“The family is so screwed up,” she continued, her voice barely above a whisper. “They hate each other.”

“No . . .” I said unconvincingly. Thinking: They close ranks. When things go wrong, they cover. Setting Parker up to take over the company. Moving Sadie’s career. Guiding their lives. But I’d also witnessed the animosity between Sadie and Parker. There was no way Luce hadn’t noticed. I thought it had stemmed from jealousy, from the expectations of their parents—a typical sibling rivalry—but maybe I was wrong.

“It’s all fake,” she said. “Imagine the lengths they must go to, all of them, to make you believe. Everything’s fake. Nothing’s real.”

But Luce had pointed the finger at me. Detective Collins told me so.

“You told the police I was obsessed with Sadie.”

She took a deep breath. “That detective . . . he was looking for something. And I didn’t want him to see it in me. He kept asking for every move I made. Where I was, every second. It’s so hard to remember every moment. What you did, what you saw . . .” She closed her eyes, but I could see them moving underneath the lids. “What was I supposed to think, though? When I arrived last summer, you were really not pleased to see me there. It wasn’t a lie, what I told him.”

“I just didn’t know you would be there,” I said. “No one told me, either.”

She twisted the coffee cup in her hands, took a long sip, then dropped the rest in the trash can beside the desk. “I thought you were after Parker at first. But then I saw—the way you and Sadie were. I don’t know what happened between the two of you over the summer, but yes, I told the police. It was a humiliating night for me, and I was sick of replaying it. And then Sadie, God. I just wanted to get out of there.” A shudder rolled through her as she finished speaking.

“You mean there was a reason they might focus on you?”

Her mouth was a thin line. “No, not me.”

Parker, then. She meant Parker. Parker’s involvement would drag her down into the mess. The way you could pull someone up into a different world but also pull someone down. It was a lesson we’d both learned from the Lomans.

Luce shrugged on her white coat. Clipped on a name tag. I thought about the ways we dressed to present ourselves. How we slipped into another disguise, another skin. How we shifted our appearance in ways to say something to one another. Luce now: I am a person who will help you. Or: I belong here.

She looked at the clock once more. “Is this what you came for? Is that enough?”

“Someone killed Sadie. That note wasn’t hers.”

She stared at me for a long time, her hands frozen on her name tag. Finally, she smoothed her hands down the side of her lab coat. Lowered her voice. “Are you asking if I think one of them could’ve done it?”

Wasn’t I? Wasn’t that what I was here for? “You knew better than me how they were.” I cleared my throat. “You saw how all of them were.” I was too close to see clearly. And, as she’d told me the day we met, she’d known them longer.

“I did.”

“I think Sadie wanted to get out of there. I think she found something out about her family.” I glanced to the side, leaving my part out of it—that whatever she had found wasn’t tied only to her family but to mine. The theft, the payments—how it was all connected, and I was a part of it.

“I don’t know that she wanted to leave, exactly,” Luce said. “I think she just wanted to be seen, like Parker was. He needs it, you know, from everyone around him. The idolization of Parker Loman.” She rolled her eyes. “But Sadie was never having it.” A little star protégé. A junior asshole. “Her teasing, it got under his skin. I’d never seen Parker’s look turn so dark as when Sadie pushed him. It was always something. She kept teasing him about his scar. I didn’t think it was that big a deal. We were all young once.” She touched her eyebrow, shrugged. “But she wouldn’t let up. Said, Oh, tell Luce about your wild youth. Parker gets away with everything. What was it again, a fight with two guys? A fight over some girl? He would stay silent, but she’d keep pushing. Say something like, Parker, your next line is: ‘You should see the other guy.’ Or do I have it wrong? Come on, tell us. Or, The sins of his youth. Locked away forever.”