The Last House Guest (ARC)

by Megan Miranda

  “Not sure.” I dripped water onto the boat, shivering, and looked for a towel, but Connor already had one out on the bench for me.

  “Is that hers?”

  “Not sure,” I repeated, leaning over him for the towel. “There’s a flash drive inside, though, and I can’t figure out why else it would be out here.”

  His hand touched my stomach, and I flinched. But his fingers didn’t move. His gaze was fixed on the spot just above my underwear, on the inside of my left hip. I stepped back, shaking him off, and he frowned. “Why do you have that?”

  I looked down to where his gaze was focused. “It’s a tattoo, Connor.”

  “It’s the same as Sadie’s.”

  My stomach twisted, and again I wondered if he was playing me. How he would have noticed that so clearly if he’d seen her only the one time.

  Once, just once, he’d said. As she stood over him in her bathing suit. “I know. We got them together.”

  Sadie was all pale pink skin that freckled in the summer. She was wide-brimmed hats and oversize sunglasses and SPF 50 in every lotion she used; a collection of freckles on her forearms that almost looked like a tan from a distance. I was a color that bordered on olive, even in the winter, like my mother. I never had to worry about the summer sun this far north. The only similarity between me and Sadie was the color of our eyes, a shade of hazel. And this ink, binding us together.

  But Connor was shaking his head. “But why that.”

  Sadie had picked it. Drove us out to the shop the day she returned, our second summer. “Incomplete infinity,” I told him. Because there was nothing that lasted forever. The ends of the symbol stretched toward each other but never met. The curved line, looping with promise, truncating at a point—so I couldn’t look at it without feeling a yearning, too.

  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.”

  He shifted to face me, one leg tucked up on the bench seat. “You know, just because you don’t talk to us anymore doesn’t mean people don’t talk about you.”

  “I know. I’ve heard it all.”

  He tilted his head back and forth, as if even that was up for debate. “Most people seemed to think you’re fucking the brother. Or the father.” He said it sharp and cruel, like he intended to hurt me with it. “I say you’re smarter than that, but what do I know.”

  “I wasn’t. I’m not.”

  He raised his hands. “Faith always thought it was the sister,” he continued. “But I told her you only wanted her life. Not her.” He dropped his hands abruptly. “Anyway, mostly she was just pissed at you, so no one really listened.”

  My stomach squeezed, heari
ng his words. Even though I’d imagined them, heard the whispers, gotten the implication from the snide comments—like Greg Randolph’s. It was different hearing them from someone who knew me, from the people who once were my closest friends. “It’s not true. Any of it.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I covered for you once before, you know. Told the police it was an accident when you pushed Faith.”

  I flinched, though he hadn’t moved. “It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  “I was there, Avery. I saw.” In the dusk, I couldn’t read his expression. Everything was falling deeper into shadows.

  I closed my eyes, seeing her fall in my memory. Feeling the surge in my bones, as I had back then. The rage, fighting its way to the surface. “It was just . . . I didn’t know she would trip.”

  His eyes grew larger. “Jesus Christ. She needed surgery. Two pins in her elbow, and God, I covered for you, even after everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my throat catching on the word. It needed to be said, now and then. “Back then, you should know, I used to think about dying. All the time.” I thought of the journal, the things I had written; the nightmare of my life. “I dreamed about it. Imagined it. There was no room for anything else.”

  “You wanted to die?” he said, like it had never occurred to him.

  “No. I don’t know.” But, the blade. The list of things I had done—leaning forward from the lighthouse, falling asleep at the edge of the water—the time he had found me on Breaker Beach, drinking so I wouldn’t have to make a decision either way.

  Salt water in my lungs, in my blood. A beautiful death, I had believed.

  But it had been Sadie’s death instead, and the reality of it was horrible. All I could give him was the truth. “It was a bad time.”

  He sighed, ran his hand through his hair. “I know. I knew it was bad timing.” He saw it the other way—that it was his fault. Timing, not time. “You weren’t yourself.” Except I was. In one way or another, I was never more myself than right then. Desperately, terrifyingly, unapologetically myself. And I’d just discovered the power of it, how it wreaked destruction, not only on myself but on others.

  “When I saw you on the beach,” he continued, “I wanted to die, too.” A smirk to soften the truth.

  “I didn’t go there to hurt you. Some nights I’d sleep out there.”

  “I know. That’s why I went there. You weren’t home, and I was worried.”

  They had just shown up. Two guys, a bonfire. I knew them, a year older, but I knew them through Connor. “Everything just went to hell.”

  I thought of that journal, how fast I was sinking, at the whim of some current I couldn’t see.

  He sighed, then spoke quietly, as if someone else might be listening in. That detective, somewhere on the dark beach in the distance, watching us. “I need to know, Avery. What role you’re playing here. It’s not just your life, you get that? It’s mine, too.”

  I didn’t understand what he was implying. “I’m not—”

  “Stop.” His entire body changed, no longer feigning nonchalance. Everything on high alert. “The police kept asking why I was there that night, at the party. And I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “Are you kidding me?” His eyes went wide. “You sent me the address. Why did you want me there?”

  “I didn’t.” I pulled out my phone, confused, even though this was a year ago.

  “You did. You sent me the address. Listen,” he said. He leaned forward, close enough to touch. “It’s just me and you here. No one can prove what you say to me right now. But I have to know.”

  I shook my head, trying to understand. “It must’ve been Sadie,” I said.

  The same way I’d just accessed her phone. I checked the password settings on my own phone now. She’d programmed her thumbprint, just as I’d done on hers—we’d done it together, years earlier. Because we shared everything, for years. And when that changed, we’d forgotten to redefine the boundaries.

  Now I was picturing Sadie getting Connor’s number from my phone. And then sending him a text about the Plus-One from me. She wanted him at the party that night. Which meant she was planning to be there, too.

  “It was from your number,” he said, his hand braced on the bench between us.

  “I didn’t send you that text, Connor. I swear it.” And yet he had shown up, thinking it was me. It was a startling confession. But Connor always saw the best possibilities in people.

  “It’s not over, Avery.”

  “I know that.”

  “Do you? Collins questioned me, sure. But I’m not the only one they want to know about. Not back then, and not now.” Even in the dark, I could feel his eyes on the side of my face. I pictured that list. The one I’d been filling in to make sense of things. But also: the one Detective Collins had slid in front of me the very first day. He’d written out each name. Avery. Luciana. Parker. Connor. A list of suspects.

  Mine was first on that list. He’d practically told me from the start: You.

  And I’d gone straight to him with the phone, hoping he’d reopen the case.

  “Did you tell the police about the text from me?” I asked.

  “No. I didn’t mention it.” His eyes slid to the side. “I didn’t mention you at all. So don’t worry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe I’m a better person than you.” He shook his head. “I loved you once.” Changing his tune but proving the first comment true in the process.

  “You hated me, too,” I said.

  He grinned tightly. “I don’t even know who I’m talking to anymore. What you’re like.”

  An echo of Greg’s thoughts, claiming I was Sadie’s monster instead of someone fully formed. There were pieces of others who gave everyone shape, of course there were. For me: my mother, my father, my grandmother, Connor and Faith, even. And yes, Sadie. Sadie and Grant and Bianca and Parker. How bizarre to expect a person to exist in a vacuum. But more than any of them, I was a product of here. Of Littleport. Same as Connor, beside me.

  “I don’t live up there anymore,” I said. He turned his head quickly, in surprise. “Long story.”

  He leaned back. “I’ve got nowhere else I need to be.”

  I tried to think of something to give him. Something true, that would mean something to him. I pictured Sadie, standing behind me in the window of her bedroom—and how we’d seen her standing there before, looking out. “At night, from the inside,” I told him, “the only thing you can see is your own reflection.”

  As we were watching the house, the lights shut off unexpectedly, all at once. Not like someone was flipping the switches one by one. Like a power outage. Everywhere I looked, darkness.

  “And I still get seasick at night.” As if there were one thing that could bridge the time. A place to start.

  “Keep your eyes fixed on something,” he said.

  “I remember.” He had said the same thing to me when I’d gotten sick over the side. But there was only the lighthouse in the distance, and the beam of light kept circling, appearing and vanishing as it moved.

  I scanned the distance for a steady object as Connor started the engine again.

  There. On the bluffs. A flash of light in the dark. Near the edge, moving away from the Loman house, down the cliff path.

  Another person, watching. Moving. Someone was there.

  “Connor. Someone’s up there. Watching. You see that, right?”

  “I see it,” he said.

  CHAPTER 19

  The twinkling glow of lights along Harbor Drive came into view as we neared shore. The lights of Littleport, steadying me—guiding me back. The docks were empty at this hour, no more workers milling about. Just a handful of visitors out for a stroll after dinner.

  How many times had Sadie
and I been out there together, imagining ourselves alone? Walking back toward Landing Lane, the sound of the waves as we passed Breaker Beach. Not noticing the people around who might be watching. Laughter in the night, stumbling in the middle of the street—oblivious to the fact that someone could’ve been lurking around their house. Blinded to the true dangers that surrounded us.

  Not tetanus, sepsis, or a misstep near the edge. Not a warning to be careful—Don’t hurt yourself—and a hand at my elbow, guiding me back.

  But this. Someone out there. Watching, and waiting, until she was left all alone.

  I HOPPED OUT OF the boat as Connor tied us up to the dock, checking to make sure the detective wasn’t anywhere in sight. “Avery,” Connor called, “you tell me what’s on that.” He nodded at the box tucked under my arm.

  I was trembling with cold, the dried salt water coarse against my skin, my hair stiff at the edges. The ground shifted beneath my feet, as if we were still out on the water. In the distance, the lighthouse flashed over the dark sea. I just wanted to get home, get warm. “I will,” I said—but honestly, that depended on what I found.

  WHEN I GOT BACK to my car, I had a missed call and voicemail. The sound of a throat clearing and then a man’s voice, professional and serious. “Avery, it’s Ben Collins. I was hoping to run into you today, wanted to check in on some things. Give me a call when you get a chance.”

  I hit delete, stored his number in my phone, and drove toward the residential section behind Breaker Beach. I decided to park a few blocks from the Sea Rose and walk, just in case the detective was still prowling the streets, looking for me.

  As I walked the two blocks toward the circle, the outside lights of the homes illuminated my path, making me feel safe, crickets chirping as I passed. I’d just turned onto the front path of the Sea Rose when I heard the sound of footsteps on rocks—coming from the dark alley between homes. I froze, unsure whether to run or move closer.

  A shadow suddenly emerged—a woman, with her hand on the side of the house for balance. She was in platform shoes, a skirt that hit just above her knees, a top that draped low in front. Unfamiliar but for the red glasses. “Erica?” I asked.