I saw Sadie then, standing at the edge of the cliffs. The blue dress blowing behind her in the wind, a strap sliding down her shoulder, the mascara running under her eyes, her hands shaking. Saw her turn around and look at me this time, her eyes wide—
Stop.
I HAD TO CALL someone.
Not the detective, who had just stared at her phone with such disbelief. Not Parker, who hadn’t told me he’d just retrieved Sadie’s personal items from the police. Not Connor, who had kept things from all of us with his silence—
My phone rang just as I was working it through. Another number not in my contacts. I wondered if it was Detective Collins already, telling me to come back. That they’d discovered something else in her phone, or they needed my help to tell them what something meant. I placed the call on speaker.
“Is this Avery?” It was a girl. A woman. Something in between.
“Yes, who’s speaking?”
“Erica Hopkins. From lunch.”
“Right, hi.”
She cleared her throat. “Justine wanted me to check in. We’ll need the piece for Sadie tomorrow—by afternoon at the latest.”
Yesterday felt like forever ago. “I can email you the piece tonight, but the photo will probably be a physical copy. I don’t have access to a scanner.” I would not contact Grant or Bianca to ask for a high-resolution image of their deceased daughter, though it would have to be one of theirs, something that once graced the walls of the Breakers. In truth, I could think of nothing more fitting.
“We’ve got a meeting at the dedication site with Parker Loman tomorrow around eleven. Right at the entrance of Breaker Beach. Want to meet us there with the photo?”
Somewhere in that house were Sadie Loman’s personal items, just returned to Parker from the police station. Parker had said he’d be working from home today, and I could see the lights from the upstairs office from their drive.
Tomorrow, around eleven, he would be out. The house would be empty.
“Why don’t you stop by after,” I said, edging the car to the other side of the garage. “I’ll meet you at their guesthouse. Just send me a text to let me know when you’re on your way up.”
Inside their house was that journal, given back to Parker. The item they used to determine the presumed last words of Sadie Loman. The thing they rested their case on.
And I needed to see it.
Something had worked its way inside, dark and sinuous. Like I had just set something in motion that I now had no power to stop.
BACK INSIDE THE BEDROOM of the guesthouse, I opened the closet door, pulling out the single box that had never been unpacked—marked K for Keep, in Sadie’s handwriting. The rest I had steadily unpacked with time, the few things of my own worth bringing. But this was the box that held my parents’ things, my grandmothers’ things.
Though the house itself did not belong to me, I knew no one would dare touch this box. For all the times that Sadie had reached into my closet, she’d never placed her hands on this.
I lifted my parents’ wedding album, my grandmother’s letters, placing them carefully aside. Until I’d unearthed the small shoebox underneath.
Inside were the photos of Sadie that once were scattered around the Loman house. Replaced each year with a new set. But Bianca had added them without removing the previous photos, stacking them one on top of the next in their frames, so they remained as one. Like layers of paint, slowly growing in thickness, until I’d removed the older images for my own safekeeping.
The surfaces were damaged slightly, adhered to the newer versions, the corners crimped and discolored from the frame. Where there once were childhood portraits, there were graduation pictures. Where there once were graduation pictures, there were vacation shots—Sadie at the Eiffel Tower, Sadie in red snow gear with mountains behind her, Sadie sitting beside Parker somewhere tropical, with the ocean behind them.
I sorted through these forgotten pictures now, trying to find the right fit for the piece. God, she would hate this. In each photo, she was either too young-looking or too happy. Too disconnected to the purpose of the article. They would want something to appeal to everyone, insider and outsider alike. She had to appear both approachable and untouchable.
In the end, I settled on her college graduation picture. She held the diploma in her hand, but her head was tipped back slightly, like she was starting to laugh. It was perfectly Sadie. And it was perfectly tragic.
This photo captured the beginning of something. It was on the nose, but it would cut hard. The beginning of a laugh, of her life. Something that I now felt had been taken from her.
And then I placed the rest of the photos back inside the box, hidden within the closet, where they would remain alongside all the other people I had lost.
SADIE JANETTE LOMAN TO be honored in Littleport memorial
My fingers tapped against the edge of the keyboard, waiting for the words to come. I stared at the photo of her in the graduation gown, the blue sky behind her over the dome of the building.
Sadie Loman may have spent nine months out of the year in Connecticut, but Littleport was her favorite place in the world.
She’d told me that the first time we met. And now she was about to become a part of its history.
For a small town, we had a long past that lived in our collective memory. It was a place filled with ghosts, from old legends and bedtime stories alike. The fishermen lost at sea, the first lighthouse keeper—their cries in the night echoed in the howling wind. Benches in memory of, in honor of; boxes moved from home to home. We carried the lost with us here.
It was a place for risk-takers, a place that favored the bold.
I was trying to find a place for Sadie in this history. Something to be part of.
She was bold, of course she was. But that wasn’t what people wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that she loved the ocean, her family, this place.
What I would say if I were telling the truth:
Sadie would hate everything about this. From the bell, to the quote, to the tribute. She’d sit on the rocks, looking down on the beach where we would all be gathered, holding a drink in her hand, and laughing. Littleport was unsympathetic and unapologetic, and so was she. As much a product of this place as any of us.
She might demand that she be forgiven. She might compensate for a perceived wrong with an over-the-top counterbalance. She might know it, deep inside, when she had gone too far.
But Sadie Loman would never apologize. Not for who she was and not for what she’d done.
I’M SORRY. I WISH it didn’t have to be this way.
Two simple sentences. The note they found. Crumpled in the trash.
What was the chance that all of this was a mistake? That the police, and her family, had seen one thing and believed another?
What were the odds that Sadie had chosen those very same words, the ones I had used earlier that summer—the ones I had written myself, folded in half, and left on the surface of her desk for her?
SUMMER
2017
The Plus-One Party
9:30 p.m.
It happened all at once. The light, the sound, the mood.
The power had gone out. The music, the house lights, the blue glow from under the water of the pool. Everything was darkness.
Inside, there were too many bodies all pressed together. My ears still buzzed from the music. Someone stepped on my foot. I heard the sound of glass breaking, and I hoped it wasn’t the window. Everything became sound and scent. Low whispers, nervous laughter, sweat and the whiff of someone’s hair product as they walked by, and then a spiced cologne.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, a breath on my neck. I froze, disoriented. And then I heard a scream. Everything stopped—the whispers, the laughter, the people brushing up against one another. The light from a phone turned on across the room, and
then another, until I pulled my cell out of my back pocket and did the same.
“She’s all right!” someone yelled from outside. Everyone shifted toward the back of the house.
I pushed my way through the crowd, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. Outside, the clouds covered the stars and the moonlight. There was only the beam of the lighthouse cutting through the sky above, swallowed up in the clouds.
It was Parker, of course, who had her, surrounded by a semicircle of onlookers. At first I could see only a dark shape curled up in Parker’s arms. He rubbed her back as she coughed up water. “Okay, you’re all right,” he was saying to her, and then she turned her face up. Ellie Arnold.
Sadie had known her forever, found her annoying. Said she would do anything for attention, and so my first thought was neither generous nor sympathetic.
But when I crouched down beside her, she was so shaken, so miserable-looking, that I knew she hadn’t done it on purpose.
“What happened?” I asked.
She was soaked, clothes clinging to her skin, trembling.
“She couldn’t see,” Parker answered for her. “She lost her place.”
“Someone pushed me,” Ellie said, arms folded around herself. “When the pool lights went out.” She coughed and half sobbed. Her long hair was stuck to her face, her neck.
“All right. You’re okay.” I repeated Parker’s words and smiled to myself, glad for the dark. The pool was four feet deep all the way across—she was never in any real danger, despite her present demeanor. All she had to do was plant her feet.
I was more worried about the sound of her scream carrying in the night.
One of Ellie’s friends finally made it through the crowd. “Oh my God,” she said, hand to her mouth. She reached down for Ellie’s hand.
“Get her inside,” Parker said, helping her stand. Ellie wobbled slightly, then leaned on her friend as the crowd parted for them.
“There are plenty of towels in the bathrooms, under the sinks,” I said. “Probably a robe somewhere, too.”
Parker looked back toward the house. An amber glow flickered in the window—someone’s lighter, the flame touched to the wick of a candle.
“I’ll go take a look,” I said. From here, we couldn’t tell whether the power had gone out in the entire town or just on our street. If it was just our street, I’d have to make a call, and this party would be over. Better if it was a town-wide outage. Best if the house had been tripped on its own from the speakers and the lights all running at once—grid overload.
Inside, someone had found the rest of the candles and lined them along the windowsills, placing the pillar from the mantel in the center of the kitchen island. The guy with the lighter finished circling the downstairs, and now everything was subdued in pockets of dim light. The faces were still in shadows, but I could see my way to the breaker panel.
The door to the master bedroom down the hall was ajar—at least the commotion had managed to clear out the people inside.
The breaker panel was inside the hall closet, and I used my phone to light up the grid. I let out a sigh of relief—this was something I could fix. Every circuit was tripped, in the off position. I flipped them back one at a time, watching as the lights came back, as people looked around the room, momentarily disoriented by where they found themselves.
At the last switch, the sound from the speakers blared unexpectedly, and my heart jumped.
“Get someone to turn that down,” I said to the guy beside me. The same one who’d accused Greg Randolph of having a fling with Carys Fontaine. “And unplug some of those lights.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a lopsided salute.
I made my way into the master bathroom, where two of Ellie’s friends were hovering around her. Ellie Arnold was clearly both mortified and shaken, and for the first time I doubted Sadie’s impression of her.
“Hey,” I said, “everything okay in here?” Someone had found the towels, half of which were heaped on the floor beside Ellie’s wet clothes. She was wrapped in a plush ivory robe, drying her hair with a matching towel. There were dark smudges under her eyes where her makeup had run. The floor was slick, the water puddling in sections, the mirror fogged. She must’ve taken a quick shower to warm up.
Ellie shook her head, not making eye contact. “Some asshole’s idea of a joke.” She leaned toward the open door. “Well, fuck you!” she yelled.
“Jesus,” I said, half under my breath, though there was no one in the bedroom to hear her yelling.
The taller of her friends grimaced, shared a wide-eyed look with the other. “Calm down, El.”
“The power was out,” I said. “No one could see. I’m sure it was an accident.” Even though I knew attempting to reason with someone fortified by an unknown quantity of alcohol was a lost cause.
But Ellie pressed her lips together. Her shoulders slumped, the sharpness subsiding. “I just want to go home.”
I looked from face to face, debating whether anyone in this room was sober enough to give her a lift, before deciding not. “I’ll see if anyone out there can take you.”
Her face didn’t change. She stared at the wall, her eyes unfocused, until I realized that home meant somewhere outside Littleport, wherever she’d be heading tomorrow.
“Come on,” the shorter friend said, arm on her shoulder. “You’ll feel better in dry clothes. Me and Liv have half the luggage in the trunk. Let’s see if we can find you something?”
That got a faint smile from her, and the three of them walked out of the bathroom together, despite the fact that Ellie was in nothing more than a bathrobe.
Maybe Sadie was right after all.
I grabbed a few garbage bags from the kitchen, using one to store Ellie’s wet clothes, which she’d absently left behind. I stuffed the used towels, splotched with grime, into the other bag, then pulled a few more from under the sink to clean the water and dirty footprints left behind.
“Don’t do that, Avie.” I turned around to see Parker standing in the entrance of the bathroom, watching me. “Leave it.”
His eyes had gone dark, a sheen of sweat over his face, his brown hair falling over his forehead. He smelled like chlorine, and his shirt clung to his chest from the impression of Ellie’s wet body.
“Someone has to do it,” I said, waiting for him to leave. Instead I heard the door clicking shut.
He took the garbage bag from my hand, finished stuffing the dirty laundry inside. We were too close. With the humidity of the room, it was hard to take a deep breath, to think clearly.
“Do you think I’m a good person?” he asked, his face so close I could see it only in sections—his eyes, the scar through his eyebrow, the ridge of his cheekbones, the set of his mouth.
Everything about Parker was hypothetical until moments like this, when there was some crack in his facade. Show me a chip in the demeanor and watch me fall. I never met a flaw I didn’t love. The hidden insecurity, the brief uncertainty. The waver behind the arrogance.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t want Parker at first. Not in all the years I knew who he was before we met, and not when I first saw him in that house. Not really until Sadie said I couldn’t have him. I knew it was cliché, that I was no different from so many others. But there was something about that—some universal appeal to the thing you could not have. Something that, for a certain type of person, settles in and redoubles desire.
But it was moments like this that focused everything—like I was seeing something that he kept hidden from everyone else. Something shared, just for me.
I pushed the hair back from his face, and he reached for my hand.
“Sorry,” I said. But he didn’t pull back. We stayed like that, mere inches apart, the room too humid, my vision unfocused at the edges.
Someone knocked on the door, and I jumped. Imagining Luce seeing us in here. “Oc
cupied,” I called, standing up.
Someone groaned on the other side, but it was a man. Still, it was enough to shock us both to our senses.
Parker’s fingers were looped around my wrist, and he let out a slow sigh. “One day I’ll probably marry Luciana Suarez and have beautiful children that are occasional assholes, but they’ll be good people.”
“Yeah, okay, Parker.” I stepped back, my vision clearing. I thought he shouldn’t be discussing being a good person while standing too close to me in a bathroom while the woman he was discussing marrying waited somewhere on the other side, but that was just part of his allure.
“Oh,” he said, shaking his head. “I came here to tell you. There’s some guy out there looking for you.” He nodded toward the door. “You go first. I’ll take care of the rest.”
I cracked open the door, making sure there was no one waiting on the other side, where a rumor could take hold and grow. When I saw the room was empty, I slipped out.
Before I shut the door again, Parker called after me: “Be careful, Avery.”
SUMMER
2018
CHAPTER 11
Friday morning, quarter to eleven, and Parker’s car was still at the house. At least I assumed it was. I hadn’t seen it pull out from the garage, and I’d been watching for it since I woke up.
He could be walking, though, down Landing Lane to the entrance of Breaker Beach. I wouldn’t be able to see if he’d left on foot from the guesthouse. I opened the living room windows surrounding my desk and tried to listen, so I’d hear a door closing or his footsteps on the gravel, disappearing down the road.
I’d pushed back a meeting with the general contractor for one of the new homes in Stone Hollow until Monday. I’d canceled the window replacement for the Blue Robin, telling the vendor we’d have to reschedule. My email sat unanswered; phone calls went unreturned. I did not want to be distracted and miss my chance.
The Last House Guest (ARC) Page 10