Page 50 of The Last House Guest
Still, I almost felt bad for him, thinking about what his own father said of him. Parker had been robbed of the chance to want something badly.
Ambition wasn’t just in the work. Ambition, I believed, was tinged with a sort of desperation, something closer to panic. Like a dormant switch deep inside that could be forced only by necessity. Something to push up against until, finally, you caught.
“Here, have a seat.” Greg Randolph pushed Parker’s now empty chair with his foot, the metal scraping against concrete. I perched on the edge, waiting for my order. “How’ve you been?” he asked, grin firmly in place. “I mean, since Friday.”
The teenager behind the counter called my name, and I excused myself for my drink. It was something mixed with caramel, steaming hot, a spice I couldn’t place. When I sat down again, I ignored his last question.
Greg gestured toward Ellie. “We were just talking about the party coming up the week after next. Will you be joining us at Hawks Ridge?” He tilted his head to the side, and I took a sip. The Plus-One party must be at his place this year. Hawks Ridge. A group of exclusive estates set on a rise of land closer to the mountains, with a distant view of the sea.
“Probably not,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said, fake-sighing. I knew why I was wanted. For the drama, for the scene, so someone could say:Look, Avery Greer, can you believe she showed her face?So someone could corner me with a shot of liquor and say:I know a secret about you.
“It won’t be the same,” Greg went on, stuffing the last bite of a messy muffin into his mouth. “First Ellie, now you,” he added, even as he was chewing.
“You’re not going?” I turned to Ellie, surprised.
She shook her head, looking down at the table, then pressed her pointer finger to a crumb on the table, dropping it onto her plate. “Not after last year.”
Sadie,I thought. Finally, someone with the sense to know this was in bad taste. Another year, another party, as if nothing at all had changed.
No one else seemed to know the truth: that one of them had done something to Sadie.
“It was an accident, love,” Greg said to Ellie, voice low. “And I have a backup generator. The power’s not going to go out up there.”
“Wait. You don’t want to go this year because you fell in the pool?” I asked her.
She cut her eyes to me, sharp and mean. “I didn’tfall.Someonepushed me.” Angry that it seemed I had forgotten her claim, and I had. Last year, I’d thought she was being overdramatic, wanting attention, like Sadie had warned. But nothing about that night was as it seemed.
“Sorry,” I said.
But even Greg Randolph wasn’t having it. He smirked as he raised the cup to his lips. “Probably bumped into you in the dark, by accident.” And then to me, in a fake whisper, “She had quite a bit to drink, I seem to recall.”
“Fuck you, Greg,” she said. “I remember just fine.”
Everything was shifting then. My memory of that night: The lights going out, the power grid tripped. A commotion. A scream.
Did someone leave in the chaos? Was someone coming back?
I pushed away from the table abruptly. “I have to go.” I had to talk to someone else who had been there, who had seen everything. Connor, maybe. Except he didn’t understand all the intricacies. The ins and outs of the Lomans’ world.
But there was someone else. Someone who was there. Who saw everything. Who was dangerous, I thought, in the things they had noticed.
And who, after all of that, did not come back.
CHAPTER 22
Sadie once said shenever knew whom to trust. Whether someone wanted to be her friend because of what she stood for. Whether they were drawn to the girl or the name. That life I’d watched from outside Littleport. The promise of something.
She had loved a boy once, at boarding school. She told me about him that first summer, like she was whispering a fairy tale. But he lived overseas, and after graduation they had broken up; he did not come back for her. I heard other names over the years, during college. But never with that same fervent whisper, the gleam in her eye, the belief that she loved and was loved.
I’m lucky I found you,she’d said at the end of that first summer.
I believed it was I who was the lucky one. A coin tossed into the air, one of hundreds, of thousands, and I had fallen closest to their home. I was the one she had picked up when she needed one.
How lucky I had been to find this girl who looked at me like I was someone different than I’d always been. Who sent a gift on my birthday or just because. Who called when I could hear other people in the room, or late at night, when I heard just the silence and her voice. Who confided in me and who sought my opinion—What do we think of this?
She had become my family. A reminder, always, that I was no longer alone, and neither was she. I knew better than to trust that anything so good could be permanent, but with her, it had been so easy to forget.
