Page 49 of The Last House Guest
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 whom 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.
I couldn’t reconcile the payment to my grandmother with anything that made sense. And there was a second payment to someone else who used the same bank.
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 BUZZINGwith 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.”
“Name?” he asked, pen poised over a Styrofoam cup.
“Avery.”
His hand hovered for a second before he resumed writing, and I wondered if he’d heard something. Knew something.
“Well, hey there.” A woman’s voice from a table against the brick wall. It was Ellie Arnold, smiling like we were friends. She was sitting across from Greg Randolph, who grinned like he was in on some joke. There was a third man hunched over the table with his back to me.
The teenager handed me my credit card, and the third man stood as I approached. And then I understood: It was Parker Loman, empty cup in hand.
“Avery,” he said, and then continued past. As if I were an old plot point. As if I were just someone caught living on his property when I shouldn’t have been there; as if I weren’t his sister’s best friend, hadn’t worked with him for years; as if he hadn’t kissed me two nights earlier.
It was a skill of the entire family, creating the story and owning it. Sadie herself, welcoming me to the Breakers. And now Parker, probably spreading this new story about me. I wondered if everyone at the table, behind the counter, out on the docks, knew that I had just, an hour ago, been fired.
