Page 10 of Willowbrooke
“Are you going to talk to him?” she asked softly.
Having been on the other side, trying to pull Mina out of an emotionally abusive relationship in college, I knew she was wary of alienating me. It could backfire and push me toward him, rather than pulling me away. She was trying to be supportive, while making sure I knew her stance on thematter.
“And tell him what?” I slumped in my seat. “I already know what he’s going to say, that he’s just friends with Zoe, and that I need to trust him.”
Mina leaned forward, reaching for my hand across the table. “Penny, you know you could stay with me.”
“I know.” I nodded. “I’m not there yet.”
“What’s really holding you back?” she asked.
I met her gaze. “When I talk to him about how I’m feeling, he explains things in a way that makes sense in the moment, but then later, it just makes me more confused.” I wasn’t quite sure how to vocalize how mixed up I felt about everything.
“Adam always seems to have an answer to everything,” Mina observed.
“He’s always so eager to make things work, and tries to find a solution to make things better, but then lets everything fall apart again.” I blinked back tears.
I knew the writing was on the wall. I knew what advice I would give Mina if she was in the same situation, but every time I got up the courage to try to confront Adam about my misgivings, he just had this way to make them all disappear.
“Like the day I gave my two weeks’ at the firm,” I brought up as an example. “After we talked through why I didn’t tell him about it before, he offered to take me to dinner to celebrate my new job. But we never went.”
“What?”
“He ended up having to work late at the office on his big project and forgot about it.” I felt a twinge of embarrassment, even though it had happened weeks prior.
“What do you mean he ‘forgot’?” Mina gritted her teeth.
“I mean, I got dressed up and sat at the apartment, waiting for him to get home, and fell asleep on the couch. But he brought me flowers the next day to make up for it,” I added, knowing it wasn’t enough. “I thought maybe he’d try to take me out a different night, but he never brought it up again after the flowers.”
“He’s always been all talk.” Mina couldn’t hold back any longer. “But you didn’t answer my question. What will it take for you to leave, Penny?”
“Courage.” I frowned.
Leo and Willowbrooke brought much-needed distraction into my life while I struggled to figure out how and when to end things with Adam.
While Leo and I were slowly warming up to each other, the house was a different story altogether.
Despite the constant natural light I insisted upon, the atmosphere remained heavy. I felt safer with Leo’s comforting presence nearby, but when alone, I was easily spooked by noises and tricks of the light that had me questioning my sanity. I always made sure to leave before dark, an increasingly difficult task as fall progressed, not to mention the guiltit instilled as I worried that I was leaving Leo with a bad impression of my work ethic.
I tried to brush off the weird feeling, the tingling at the back of my neck when I was alone in a room, or the sense of being watched. But one day, a few weeks into the project, I couldn’t ignore my instincts any longer.
While doing the furniture inventory, I had used my phone to take as professional “before” shots of the home as I could. I was referencing one of the photos of the pink room, one of the three guest bedrooms upstairs, when I noticed an odd shadow in the corner, but it was absent from the subsequent photos. On top of that, there were weird light specks littered across the last few photos of the same room.
“Leo, come look at this.” I beckoned him from the storage room behind the kitchen, where he was sorting through a wall of junk that had accumulated—our project now also seemed to include both organizing and decluttering the entire house, but I didn’t mind, because it meant more time with Leo.
Leo sauntered out of the room and glanced at my camera, but he just shrugged, unimpressed with the photos.
“That’s not normal,” I declared, swiping back and forth between the photo with the shadow and the next one, the same composition, where it was gone. “And what about the specks?”
“It’s just dust, Penny,” he dismissed me, already on his way back to the storage room.
“That shadow isn’t dust!” I called after him. I created a newfolder on my laptop and decided to throw any incriminating photos into it. Maybe if I had more evidence, he’d believe me. Not that there was anything either of us could do about it, if the house was haunted, but I would have appreciated some validation.
A week later, another incident transpired in the basement. Leo remembered there might be extra dining chairs and a table leaf down there, and asked if I could check it out.
The basement was a whole other level of terrifying.
Only lit by two dangling and dim light bulbs hanging on opposite ends of the expansive space, the basement had never been touched by any of the previous renovations. Save for a new set of stairs descending into the must and cobwebs, it looked as it would have when the house was built in the eighteen hundreds.
