Hannah cried out in frustration. “Why. Why are you always here? Always, always, always! It’s midnight.” Her black skirt, her red heels. Where could she be going in that get-up? Nowhere good. Ellie pulled at Julia’s hand, toward the trail. “You can’t go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. You’re in your nightgown.”
Hannah felt impotent, twisted up and tied by loyalty. If she ran to get Fae, her sister would be pushed even further away. No one liked a tattletale, a snitch. If she let her go and something terrible happened to her (she imagined them falling drunk into the river, churning thick as a milkshake from all the rain), she’d never forgive herself.
Julia let herself be pulled away by Ellie, down the path, her flip-flops catching on the fallen sticks and branches. She glanced back once, her finger to her lips, her eyes pleading.
Hannah spent the whole night lying awake with worry. Waiting for her sister to return, to hear her footsteps in the hall, creeping into her bedroom. She never heard her. She went down to breakfast, bleary and exhausted. At the table sat Julia: hair wet from a shower, dressed in shorts, the string from her bikini poking out of the neck of a bright-pink T-shirt.
“Hi!” Julia said brightly. Fae bustled in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors. Julia chattered on about a book she was reading, filling the silence with dragons and battles and princesses. Stupid, childish chatter.
“Where have you been?” Hannah asked between her teeth as she sat next to her sister.
“What do you mean?” Julia blinked innocently.
“I mean I waited all night for you to come home. You didn’t.” At her sister’s blank face, Hannah sighed frustratedly. “In the courtyard? I saw you, remember?” She didn’t even care if Aunt Fae got mad anymore. Hannah was tired of Julia’s secretiveness, tired of her games. “With Ellie?”
“Ellie!” Aunt Fae exclaimed, turning to them. Her face seemed to pale. “Is that true? Did you go out last night?” Her voice was fearful, cut with a skittering panic. She’d begun to question them, asking about their comings and goings when she never had before. Sneaking out of the house late at night would have made her sick with worry.
“Hannah, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Julia shook her head, patted her sister’s hand. “You have dreams sometimes.” She held Hannah’s gaze then, her eyes clouded, impenetrable, almost gray with warning. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but I was sleeping in my room all night.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Now
When she came home from Lila’s house, Huck and Rink were nowhere to be found. She’d missed a call while she was driving; a voice mail told her that Serenity Acres, a hospice center twenty-five miles away, had called. They had an opening.
An opening. An opening at a hospice meant that someone had died. Hannah felt a certain kind of hopelessness at that. On one hand, her uncle would have a place to go. Comfort and care and twenty-four-hour monitoring for his last days on earth. On the other, a family somewhere was mourning the loss of someone they loved. Or perhaps—and this was even sadder—they weren’t.
The hiss-hum of Uncle Stuart’s ventilator could be heard from the hallway. Hannah paused, listening for the patter of Alice’s footsteps. When she was certain Alice wasn’t in the room, she pushed the door open. Stuart was turned slightly on his side, propped by a roll pillow. She knew Alice would be back shortly—she never left him propped for long. It was mostly to keep him moving, avoid bedsores, atrophy. His arm dangled off the side of the bed, his fingers curled and pale.
Hannah pulled the desk chair up to the bed and covered Uncle Stuart’s hand with her own, angling it back slightly to rest on the mattress for support. “Uncle Stuart, it’s Hannah.” His eyes fluttered above the breathing mask but did not open.
“I found an opening for you. I don’t want to send you away. You understand, don’t you? Are you mad, I wonder?” Her voice was quiet, and she rubbed the papery skin on the back of his hand. She felt her eyes tear, her throat sting. “You can’t want to live like this. This isn’t a life. This is . . . torture.”
She looked around the room. The curtains were drawn, but through the slit in the middle, she could see the rosy glow of twilight.
“You understand, right? I can’t take care of you, Uncle Stuart. I don’t know how. I have to go back to work, or I’ll be fired, eventually. Alice can’t be here twenty-four hours.” She took a deep breath. “I have regrets; do you? Why did we stop talking? Why did I think I had so much more time?” It was selfish, unforgivable.
Hiss-hum. Hiss-hum. Hiss-hum. The steady beeping of his electronically displayed heartbeat.
“Why didn’t we ever know anything about Ruby? How did she really die? Did Fae spend her whole life feeling guilty about what happened?” Hannah felt emboldened by the silence; the darkness of the room felt like a tomb. She had so many questions. “Was Aunt Fae Ellie’s mother?” The question had come so late—Hannah couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought about it before. She blamed lack of sleep; her thinking felt underwater. “Aunt Fae was at least Ellie’s stepmother, but neither of you ever talked about her. Or to her. She came to this house! So many times. Nothing about this makes sense.” She laughed shrilly, the sound echoing in the oversize room. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”
And she did. Her real life, in Virginia, felt incredibly far away, like it had happened to a wholly different person. She could barely remember Huck and their lazy weeknights, dinner at the pub down the street, walking home hand in hand, woozy from wine and stomachs full of greasy french fries and burgers. Falling into bed, the feel of Huck against her skin. Waking up with Rink’s nose wet against her cheek. The texts from friends, the constant swirl of activity that filled her days. Her job: matching stock photos and fonts to elicit the exact response she wanted. All while Uncle Stuart had lain up here dying, the seeds of truth of her sister’s disappearance slowly dying with him. Even if he didn’t know everything, he must have known something.
She’d always assumed that if she wanted the time, she had it. It all seemed so vapid now. Stupid. Worthless.
“How did you and Fae even meet? How did you get this castle? Where did it come from?” And then the things she couldn’t ask: What do I do now? She felt like she’d opened a Pandora’s box and let all the questions out, the ones she’d held tight for so long and those she hadn’t known to ask, and she’d never be able to leave until she answered them. Until she knew what had happened that summer and everything that had led up to it.
“I can’t leave,” Hannah said, breaking the silence across the dark bedroom. Huck had finally returned from his walk in the woods. A late night this time. He’d been grumpy, short with her. She’d made them pasta and pesto using basil from the garden. The herb garden was bursting and fragrant, the smells reminding her of Aunt Fae.
“What happened to you?” Hannah had barked when Huck had come through the kitchen door at almost nine o’clock. She’d called his cell phone, but it had gone straight to voice mail. There was never great service on the mountain.