impression of privilege to this room.
It made no sense. This room looked nothing like her mother.
She opened the set of French doors and stepped out onto the balcony, crunching into dried oak leaves that were ankle-deep. Everything had felt so precarious since her mother’s death, like she was walking on a bridge made of paper. When she’d left Boston, it had been with a sense of hope, like coming here was going to make everything okay. She’d actually been comforted by the thought of falling back into a cradle of her mother’s youth, of bonding with the grandfather she hadn’t known she had.
Instead, the lonely strangeness of this place mocked her.
This didn’t feel like home.
She reached to touch her charm bracelet for comfort, but felt only bare skin. She lifted her wrist, startled.
The bracelet was gone.
She looked down, then around. She frantically kicked the leaves on the balcony, trying to find it. She rushed back into the room and dragged her bags in, thinking maybe the bracelet had caught on one of them and slipped inside. She tossed her clothes out of them and accidentally dropped her laptop, which she’d wrapped in her white winter coat.
But it wasn’t anywhere. She ran out of the room and down the stairs, then she banged out of the front door. It was so dark under the canopy of trees now that she had to slow down until the light from the streetlights penetrated, then she ran to the sidewalk.
After ten minutes of searching, she realized that either she had dropped it on the sidewalk and someone had already taken it, or it had fallen out in the cab when she was toying with it and it was now on its way back to Raleigh -where the cab had picked her up at the bus station.
The bracelet had belonged to her mother. Dulcie had loved it-loved the crescent moon charm in particular. That charm had been worn thin by the many times Dulcie had rubbed it while in one of her faraway moods.
Emily walked slowly back into the house. She couldn’t believe she’d lost it.
She heard what sounded like a clothes dryer door slam, then her grandfather came out of the kitchen. “Lilacs,” she said when he met her in the foyer, where she had stopped and waited for him to notice her so she wouldn’t startle him. How odd that he was the giant, yet she was the one who felt out of place.
He gave her a cautious look, like she was out to trick him. “Lilacs?”
“You asked what the wallpaper was in Mom’s old room. It’s lilacs.”
“Ah. It was always flowers, usually roses, when she was a little girl. It changed a lot as she got older. I remember once it was lightning bolts on a tar-black background. And then another time it was this scaly blue color, like a dragon’s belly. She hated that one, but couldn’t seem to change it.”
That made Emily smile. “That doesn’t sound like her at all. I remember once…” She stopped when Vance looked away. He didn’t want to know. The last time he saw his daughter was twenty years ago. Wasn’t he even curious? Stung, Emily turned away from him. “I guess I’ll go to bed now.”
“Are you hungry?” he asked as he followed her at a distance. “I went to the grocery store this morning. I bought some teenager food.”
She reached the first step on the staircase and turned, which made him step back suddenly. “Thank you. But I really am tired.”
He nodded. “All right. Tomorrow, maybe.”
She went back to the bedroom and fell onto the bed. Mustiness exploded from the mattress. She stared at the ceiling. Moths had come in, attracted to the light, and they were hopping around the cobwebby chandelier. Her mother had grown up with a
She reached over and pulled some of her clothes from the floor and buried her face in them. They smelled familiar, like her mother’s incense. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to cry. It was too early to say this was a bad decision. And even if it was, there was nothing she could do about it. She could survive a year here, surely.
She heard the wind skittering dried leaves around the balcony, something she realized sounded remarkably like someone walking around out there. She moved the clothes from her face and turned her head to look out the open balcony doors.
The light from the bedroom illuminated the closest treetops in the backyard, but their limbs weren’t swaying. She sat up and crawled off the bed. Once outside, she looked around carefully. “Is anyone here?” she called, not knowing what she would do if someone actually answered.
Something suddenly caught her eye. She quickly stepped to the balustrade. She thought she saw something in the woodline beyond the gazebo in the overgrown backyard.
There! There it was again. It was a bright white light-a quick, zippy flash-darting between the trees. Gradually, the light faded, moving back into the darkness of the woods until it disappeared completely.
She turned to go back in and froze.
There, on the old metal patio table, sitting on top of a layer of dried leaves, was her mother’s charm bracelet.
Where it hadn’t been just minutes ago.
TOO MUCH wine.
That’s what Julia would blame it on.
When she saw Stella in the morning, she would say, “Oh, and that thing I said about Sawyer last night, forget it. It was just the wine talking.”
As Julia made her way up to her apartment that evening, she felt vaguely panicked and not at all mellow-as summer wine on the back porch with Stella usually made her. She only had six months before she was free of this town again, six months that were supposed to be easy, the downhill slope of her two-year plan. But with one tiny slip of the tongue, she’d just made things infinitely harder on herself. If what she said got back to Sawyer, he wouldn’t let it rest. She knew him too well.
She opened the door at the top of the staircase and stepped into the narrow hallway. Nothing had been done to the upper story of Stella’s house to make it look like an apartment. There were four doors off the hallway. One led to the bathroom, one to Julia’s bedroom, one to a second bedroom that had been converted into a kitchen, and another to a tiny third bedroom that Julia used as a living room.
Years ago, after Stella’s ex-husband had spent his way through Stella’s trust fund, he’d decided they should bring in renters for extra money, so he’d put a long curtain at the top of the staircase and said, “Voila! Instant apartment.” Then he’d been surprised when there were no takers. Men of thoughtless actions are always surprised by consequences, Stella always said. The last year of his and Stella’s marriage, he’d started leaving a fine black dust on everything he’d touched, proof of his black heart, Stella claimed. When she’d discovered the black dust on other women-sprinkled on the backs of their calves when they wore shorts on summer days, and behind their ears when they wore their hair up-Stella had finally kicked him out. Afterward she got her brother to put a door at the top of the staircase, and a sink and an oven hookup in one of the bedrooms, hoping something good might come from finishing something her lousy ex-husband had started. Julia was her first tenant.
Initially, Julia had been uneasy about renting a place from one of her old high school enemies. But she’d had no choice. Stella’s apartment had been the only place Julia could afford when she’d moved back to Mullaby. She’d been surprised to find that despite their pasts, she and Stella actually got along. It was an unlikely friendship, one Julia still didn’t know how to explain. Stella had been one of the most popular girls at Mullaby High, a member of Sassafras-what the elite group of pretty, sparkly girls had called themselves. Julia had been the girl everyone avoided in the hallways. She’d been sullen and rude and undeniably strange. She’d dyed her hair bright pink, worn a studded leather choker every day, and used eyeliner so thick and black that she’d looked bruised.
And her father had tried so hard not to notice.
Julia walked down the hall to her bedroom. But before she turned on the light, she noticed a light coming from Vance Shelby’s house next door. She went to her open window in the darkness and looked out. All the time she’d lived in Stella’s house, all the sleepless nights she’d spent staring out this window, and she’d never once seen a light in the upstairs bedrooms next door. There was a teenager on the balcony. She was just standing there, as still as snow, staring into the woods behind Vance’s house. She was willow-branch thin, had a cap of yellow hair, and a
