Page 30 of The Girl from Widow Hills
“Thanks, you know I will.”
He turned back but stopped halfway. “Everything go okay with Nina?”
“Nina?” Elyse cut in. “Wasn’t that the detective?”
I knew Rick had given a statement, just as I had—and I wanted to ask. Wanted to make sure they matched up, wanted to know whether there was anything else the police had mentioned to Rick. But not with Elyse here. Not with the police just on the other side of the walls.
“Yes,” I said, answering them both. “It was fine. She brought me to the hospital for my knee.” I gestured down. “I needed stitches.”
“Oh, good. Good,” Rick said. “I know her family. She was always a good kid.” Then he turned away.
None of us were kids anymore, but I wondered if Rick could only see us that way, so far removed from his own past. “Call if you need anything, Rick,” I said to his back.
I closed the back door, and the silverware drawer rattled, a quirk of the house.
He raised his hand in acknowledgment as he walked away. I watched from the window, standing beside Elyse, as he turned back for his own house, satisfied that I was home and safe.
“That was odd,” Elyse said, the moment between us long gone.
“No. That’s just Rick. He keeps an eye on me.”
“Mm,” she said, turning back to the eggs. “Where do you keep the whisk?”
I pulled out the middle drawer, handed it to her, and as she turned away, beating the eggs over the countertop, I stared at the top drawer.
A box cutter, she’d said. Something sharp and short and efficient. I’d used mine just a few days earlier to open the box of my mother’s things. I held my breath, eased the top drawer open slightly. Pens and scissors and a pad of paper. I moved a few things around with shaking hands, but I didn’t have to. I could already tell: It was gone.
“I should’ve asked,” Elyse said. “You good with scrambled?”
I eased the drawer shut, feeling untethered, a balloon floating away.
“Liv?” she asked. “That pill isn’t working already, is it?”
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Yes, scrambled is great.” I heard the click of the gas before the flame caught, the sizzle of butter in the pan on the stovetop.
I didn’t like enclosed places, which was part of the allure of the house: the openness around it; the multiple windows and exits; the rooms that flowed from one straight into another. But now I felt bound by the perimeter, like people were watching; like I shouldn’t leave without reason.
The box cutter wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Something breaking open inside me. All the possibilities of where it might be.
The box had arrived on Wednesday, and I’d used the box cutter to slice through the tape. I’d pulled out the contents, gotten swept away in the moment . . . I must’ve slid it into a different drawer afterward, my mind unfocused. Or left it inside the box by accident, as I replaced each item.
“Sit,” she said, pointing the whisk at me. What I really wanted to do was ask her to leave so I could go through the drawers one by one. Search the house top to bottom until I found it, and be sure. Because that was the problem: I could never be sure. Not until I had it in my hand.
Elyse slid the dish in front of me, and I continued to surprise myself, scooping up the eggs like I hadn’t eaten in days, practically ravenous. Even after all this.
“You might want to slow down a bit . . .”
I put the fork down, a memory surfacing.
Eggs on the tray in front of me. My mom beside the bed, arms crossed. The doctor at the foot of the bed. The sound of the fork against the tray, nothing satisfying, an endless bottom. “Slow down, Arden—”
The days after the rescue. Scenes flickering into focus—though incidents that might not be real.
It had been happening like that ever since I opened the box—this blurring of time.
I’d passed a group of nurses gossiping in the lobby the morning after the box arrived, and thought I’d heard my mother’s laughter—the unrestrained, high-pitched giggle that used to make people expect a child or a teen instead of a full-grown adult woman with a child of her own.
The same thing had happened around the ten-year anniversary. Flashes of memories that could not be mine:
