Page 48 of The Last House Guest
“Wait.” I said it out loud, though I didn’t know whom I was talking to. Just.Wait.
Every family has secrets, Avery.Connor had said those very words last night, but I had never considered my own.
Erica’s words in my living room—that Sadie had requested me by name. I had never considered that this could be true. Never stopped to think what could’ve drawn her to me in the first place.
But here it was.
I pushed back from the table, reimagining the scene. The bathroom. Sadie turning around, finding me there. The red creeping up her neck.
Had she known, all along, I was in there?
The slip of the blade. The toilet paper pressed to the blood.
Don’t hurt yourself. She had said that so clearly, so earnestly, when I’d stood too close to the edge.
As if, from the start, she had known.
She had seen me in the kitchen of her house. Followed me. Known what I had done.
Later, she’d found that journal, and she knew the hidden things I dreamed and feared. Keeping it all a secret for herself.
What did shewantwith me? Did she know I’d once sneaked into her house? Shimmied inside with Faith and Connor?
Or that I had watched from Connor’s boat, staring in those big portrait windows—her life, her body, that I wanted to inhabit?
She had sought me out on the beach after, inviting me back. Into her home, into her life. Welcoming me—
Or.Or.
Something that belonged to her. Oh. Oh, no. No, Sadie.
Bringing me to dinner, watching her parents’ faces, the stiff expressions. Her guileless smile.Do you see me now?
A sad story to share: Look what has become of this girl. No family, nowhere to live. Won’t you help? Grant’s voice when they offered me the guesthouse:It’s the right thing to do.
The ink on my body, same as hers, the shape of anS—I have found you, and you belong, here, with me.
Don’t,she said when her brother walked by.
She believed I was the secret. And, like the locals would gossip, she planted me right out in the open.Look what I have found. Look what I have done.
She believed I was a Loman.
CHAPTER 21
Ipaced a circle inthe living room of the Sea Rose, phone held to my ear. All the information fighting for space. My grandmother’s account. The way Sadie and I had met, even. Everything was shifting.
Connor’s line kept ringing, and I hung up just as the call went to voicemail. He’d be working now, even though it was Sunday.People need to eat.What he’d always say when we were younger, when I was annoyed by his hours and his commitment to them.
The ocean was an addiction for him—a shudder rolling through him, like that first sip of alcohol coursing through the bloodstream.
I locked the front door to the Sea Rose when I left, but I brought the flash drive with me, scared to have it out of my possession. It was the closest I’d felt to Sadie since her death. My footsteps tracing her path, my hands where hers had been. My mind struggling to keep up.
All the secrets she’d never shared with me—but she had been wrong about this one. If she’d asked, I would’ve told her: I was not a Loman.
I would’ve explained that I looked like my mother, yes, with the dark hair and the olive skin, but my eyes were my father’s. That my mother stopped here and put down roots not for that thing she was chasing, as she claimed, but because she met a guy, a teacher, and he was soearnestin his beliefs, so sure this was the place he belonged and that he was doing the thing he was meant to be doing. And his earnestness made her drop her guard, see the world through his eyes: that nothing would happen that hadn’t been planned—and then she ended up pregnant with me.
It was not a perfect marriage, not a perfect life. It was always there, in the unspoken places of every argument—the reason she had stayed. The life she was living and the one she seemed to be searching for still.
