The Last House Guest (ARC)
Page 19
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.
“Nothing.” Because it was nothing. With Luce in town, with Sadie here, that moment with Parker could never happen.
Maybe that was my mistake. Maybe all I needed to say to Sadie about Connor was Don’t. But who could say that to her?
To be Sadie Loman was to do exactly what you wanted. If it had been Sadie who had pushed Faith, watched as she fell to the ground, her arm held out awkwardly to break the impact—all would be forgiven. If I had been the one to steal money from the Loman company, I would’ve been kicked out of their world immediately. But not her. She was just given a different job. A better one. And what had happened to the money? Who knew. She’d probably spent it.
She took what she wanted and did what she wanted—they all did. Parker, Grant, Bianca, Sadie. Living up at the Breakers, looking out over everything. Deciding what would be theirs for the taking.
The crowd moved on around me, a blur of faces, sweat, and heat, the prickle on the back of my neck—this feeling that I had to get out of here. But I had no idea where to go.
How long had I been standing perfectly still, watching the lives of others play out around me? Leaning against a wall, drinking what was left of the Lomans’ whiskey?
The Lomans’ house, the Lomans’ rules, the Lomans’ world.
Like sitting in Connor’s boat, watching from the outside in. No matter how close I got, I was always the one watching.
There was Parker, whispering into Luce’s ear, crouched beside her while she sat in a low chair near the edge of the pool. Her gaze fixed somewhere in the distance.
There were Ellie Arnold and her friends, sitting on the floor together in the corner of the den, cross-legged, like a memory of a time long past—girls at a sleepover, the rest of the world fallen away, like Faith and I used to have.
It took me a moment to realize one of the girls in the group was passed out, her head tipped back against the wall, and that her friends had remained with her, here. A large salad bowl rested beside her, and I realized it was in case she vomited. Ellie placed a wet washcloth on the girl’s forehead, and I looked away.
There was Greg Randolph, sitting on the couch, his arm behind a girl who appeared to be on the cusp of eighteen, her gaze turned up to his, like he was everything worth knowing.
And there was Connor, crossing the room, heading for the door, his phone out in his hand.
“Connor,” I called, before I could think better of it. When he turned, I saw him as Sadie might, without the layers and years that had come between us. I saw him as a girl looking out over the balcony of Harbor Club, watching a man step off his boat, self-assured and perfectly himself. A man who would act exactly the same whether someone was watching or not. The rarest thing.
He didn’t care who Sadie was, who any of them were. He was someone, she knew, who once was mine. The only thing left here that still belonged to me, and me alone. And I knew she had to have him.
I pushed off from the wall, met him in the foyer. “Don’t go yet,” I said.
His head tipped to the side, but he didn’t say no. For all our history, I knew his weakness as well as he knew mine. Connor believed in a linear life. He’d known what he would do from the time he was a kid: He would finish school, he would work summers for his dad and for any fisherman looking for a second deckhand. He would fall in love with a girl he’d known his entire life, and she with him, just as his parents had done before.
He was unprepared when his life veered off track.
I smiled as I had once before, when he tipped me backward at the bonfire, kissed me in front of our friends—his mouth, a grin.
I knew, same as he did then: Things like this required a bold move. Me, in a crowd of people—in front of Parker Loman and everyone in their world—whispering in his ear, asking him to follow me down the hall.
My hand trailed down his arm until my fingers linked with his, and he did not resist. I walked slowly, in case anyone wanted to see. In case Greg Randolph would turn from the couch, raise an eyebrow, say, That’s the guy I saw Sadie with. But no one did, and I didn’t even care. I was high on the knowledge that he wanted me still, even after all this time.
It was dark in the downstairs bedroom, and I turned the lock. Didn’t say anything, for fear it might break the trance.
I pulled his face down to mine, but the feel of his kiss was still a surprise. I could taste the liquor on him. Feel the looseness of his limbs as I pushed his shirt over his head. The mallea
ble quality of him, where I could slide myself into his life. The power I held—that I could alter the course of everything to follow.
But he was the one who guided me toward the bed. Who whispered in my ear—hi—like he’d been waiting all this time just to say it.
In the dark, I wasn’t sure whether he was imagining me or Sadie, but it didn’t matter. His fingers just below my hips, brushing over a tattoo he couldn’t see.
Nothing lasts forever. Everything is temporary. You and me and this.
Connor was no longer the Connor I knew—and neither was I. Six years had passed, and we had become something new. Six years of new experiences, life lived and learned. Six years to sharpen into the person you would become. But there were shadows of the person I knew: in the arm around my waist, holding me to him. And his fingers faintly drumming against my skin after, before his hand went still.
Neither of us spoke then. We lay there, side my side, until a noise from out in the hall jarred us both. A hand at the locked doorknob. I bolted upright.
“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.
It took over a month to get the results back, and by then I’d almost forgotten about it. Until she barged in and told me to check my email. Good news, I’m not dying. At least, not of any of these eighteen conditions, she’d said. And surprise, I am very, very Irish. In case my sunburn led you to believe otherwise.
She watched over my shoulder as I checked, then showed me how she entered her info into a genealogy database. Maybe we’re distant cousins, she said. Waiting, holding her breath, while I did the same.
We weren’t.
I saw the reflection of her face in the screen of my laptop, the brow knitting together, the corners of her mouth turning down. But I was too preoccupied with the fact that my family tree branched outward suddenly. I was the only one left of the relatives I knew. My mother had cut off contact with her family before I was born, and they hadn’t even come to the funeral. But here, I saw something new stretched before me—the tie of blood, connecting me to a world of people out there who I’d never known existed.
I didn’t realize then that Sadie had been expecting something different. That she wanted me to know the truth, and this was the way to do it. There would be no turning back then. No more secrets. Everything and everyone exposed.
But she’d been wrong.
The summer after her first year of college, Sadie had interned for her father—that was when I met her. She had been working in his office, in his accounts. Had she stumbled upon this and found me because of it?
What did she understand when she realized she was wrong after all?
HARBOR DRIVE WAS BUZZING with midmorning activity. It was the last Sunday before Labor Day weekend—and by the time I found a place to park, I probably could’ve walked from the Sea Rose.
Though the streets were crowded, everything felt vaguely unfamiliar. A sea of ever changing faces, week by week, somehow shifting the backdrop with their presence. I wove through the crowd on the sidewalks, headed toward the docks, but saw a familiar figure standing still in the bustle of activity across the way. Dark pants and a button-down, sunglasses pulled over his eyes, feet shoulder width apart, head moving slowly back and forth—Detective Ben Collins was here.
I sucked in a breath, dipped into the first store on my right. The bell chimed overhead, and I found myself in the long, snaking line of Harbor Bean—the favorite coffee shop of locals and visitors alike. In the fall, the hours would shift and the prices would change. It was mostly a place for the visitors right now. None of us wanted to pay more than something was worth.
I peered over my shoulder as the line shifted forward, but I had lost sight of the detective through the front glass windows. There were too many people passing back and forth, too many voices, too much commotion. “Next?”
“Coffee,” I answered, and the teenager behind the counter raised an eyebrow. He tipped his head to the chalkboard menu behind him, but the script all blurred together. “I don’t care,” I said. “Just pick something with caffeine.”