Page 62 of The Last House Guest
Here. Here it was. Money going out. A piece of evidence left behind after all.
I traced the date, finger to the screen.
It was the month after my parents had died.
I sat back in the chair, the room turning cold and hollow. I’d thought we had gotten a life insurance payment—that’s what Grant had mentioned when he helped me organize the records. I was in good shape because of that.
But I looked again. An even one hundred thousand dollars. The same amount that Sadie had discovered, sent from the Lomans to my grandmother. Not a life insurance policy at all. Not an inheritance, either. Money, suddenly, where there had been none.
My stomach twisted, pieces connecting in my head.
I pulled up the images from Sadie’s phone—the photos she had taken. The picture of the winding, tree-lined mountain road. And I finally understood what Sadie had uncovered. The thing tying me to the Lomans. The cash payment she had found.
It was a payoff for the death of my parents.
CHAPTER 27
Here’s a new game:If I’d known the Lomans were responsible for my parents’ accident, what would I have done?
All night I played this game. In the dark of the house, with nothing but shadows and ghosts for company. What I would say, what I would do—how I would corner them into the truth. No: What I would take from them instead.
I felt it as I sat there—not the creeping vines of grief, pulling me down. But that other thing. The burning white-hot rage of a thing I could feel in the marrow of my bones. The surge gathering as I stepped forward and pushed.
I wanted to scream. Wanted to scream the truth to the world and watch them fall because of it. I wanted them to pay for what they had done.
But there was a flip side to that knowledge. Because here was what else that payment provided: a motive.Mymotive. All of the evidence fell back on me. The phone that I had found. Her body, with signs of a struggle, in my trunk. Me, wandering around the back of the Lomans’ house that night, looking for any piece of evidence left behind. And the note on the counter. It was my handwriting. My anger. My revenge. It wasmine.
THERE WAS A KNOCKat the front door, and I peered out the gap between the front curtains, expecting that Grant or Parker had somehow found me. Or Bianca, come to tell me to leave again. But it was Connor. I saw his truck at the curb, so obvious on the half-empty street. “Avery? You in there?” he called.
Shit, shit.I unlocked the door and he strode inside as if I’d invited him.
“How did you know where I was?” I asked as he looked around the unfamiliar house. His eyes stopped on the stacks of family albums and letters on the counter.
He paused a moment, staring at the article on top of the pile, a black-and-white photo of the wreckage—Littleport couple killed in single-car wreck.
“Connor?”
“She told me what happened,” he said, dragging his eyes back to me. “Faith.” He was breathing heavy, wound tight with adrenaline.
“How did you know I was here?” I repeated. I thought I’d been so careful, but here he was, unannounced. I didn’t like the way his gaze lingered on my things. I didn’t like the way he was standing—on edge.
“What?” He shook his head, like he was trying to clear the conversation. “It’s not hard to find out if you know what you’re looking for.” I took a step back, and he frowned, his eyes narrowing. “You told me you weren’t living at the Lomans’ anymore. But you’re not at Faith’s, most of the hotels are still full... Plenty of people mentioned seeing you around. I checked a couple of the rental properties until I saw your car downtown. This was the closest one.” He started pacing the room again, like there was nowhere else for his energy to go. “Faith didn’t hurt Sadie, I told you. You believe her, right?”
“Wait.” My eyes were closed, my hand out. I couldn’t follow both conversations at once. “People told you they’d seen me around?” I’d noticed it recently, hadn’t I? The way people looked at me, the way they watched. How they seemed to recognize something about me. I thought it was because of the investigation, new rumors that might be swirling. But maybe it had always been there. And like the Lomans, I’d become desensitized, unaware of the gazes. “Right,” I said, hands gripping the counter in front of me, spanning the distance between me and Connor. “The girl fucking around with the Lomans up there. Is that the talk?”
His throat moved as he swallowed, but he didn’t deny it. “The girl doingsomethingup there.”
I looked to the side, to the covered windows and the dark night beyond. I didn’t understand why he was here, what he wanted. How many people knew I was hiding out here? Hadn’t I learned better than to think I was invisible by now?
“It wasn’t Faith,” he repeated.
“Yes, I know it wasn’t Faith. I know what that money was for now.” My hands tightened into fists. My entire adult life built on a lie. On a horrific secret. Molded by people I thought had given me so much but instead had taken everything.
Connor stopped moving, watching me carefully. Maybe this was my downfall—always too trusting in the end; choosing someone else over the solitude. Yet again thinking people had anything but their own interests at heart. We were alone in this house, with no one else around. He had kept things from me already, and we both knew it. But Connor washere.And he’d come for me that night, a year ago, when Sadie had texted him from my phone. With him, there was always a push and pull. Logic versus instinct. I didn’t know which motive had brought him to my door in the middle of the night, but I’d learned long ago it counted only when you knew someone’s flaws and chose them anyway.
“The Lomans, they paid off my grandmother after my parents died.”
He blinked, and I watched as his entire demeanor shifted. “What?”
