For who? She didn't have guests. She didn't have anyone. She had me, a daughter who left and stopped calling and stopped reading her letters, and she made up two beds anyway, just in case, because June Holden was a woman who planned for every possibility, including the one where her stubborn, angry girl came home.
I lie in the dark on sheets my mother ironed for a guest who never came and stare at the ceiling and try to breathe around the knot in my throat. The questions follow me under the covers.
The darkness up here is total. No streetlights, no ambient glow from neighboring houses, no headlights on a distant road. The mountain dark is a substance, thick and textured, and it presses against the windows like something trying to get in. I hold my hand up in front of my face and see nothing. My own body has disappeared.
The house talks all night. Pops and groans from the walls, the arthritic complaint of old joists adjusting to the cold, the occasional sharp crack from the roof that sounds like a footstep and isn't. I tell myself it isn't. Somewhere below me, in the root cellar, something shifts with a low, scraping sound, like a heavy object being dragged across stone. The furnace, probably. Old pipes. The mechanical digestion of a house that's been swallowing mountain winters for over a century.
The lavender smell has faded. In its place, rising through the floorboards, is something older: cold stone, mineral dust, the deep-earth breath of a place that hasn't been opened in a long time. It smells like the air that came through the seams of a steel door I haven't found yet. I won't know that until tomorrow.
I pull the covers to my chin and listen to the house breathe, and the house listens back, and neither of us sleeps well.
I keep circling the same questions. What she wanted me to find. Why she kept my room ready for a return she had no guarantee of. The ironed sheets, the made bed, the bookmark in the Cather novel. All of it arranged like an offering, like a trail of crumbs left by a woman who understood that the only way to make her stubborn, angry, runaway daughter listen was to die first.
The clock in the hallway stays silent. 3:47. The time it stopped, years ago, on a date I realize with a slow, cold certainty I will have to look up because my mother didn't keep broken things without a reason either.
2
CALLUM
My uncle calls at six in the morning, which means he's been awake since four, which means something is bothering him, which means something is bothering me whether I want it to or not.
"She's here," he says, skipping the greeting the way he always does, as if pleasantries are a toll he's decided he no longer has to pay. "Drove in yesterday evening. Aggie at the gas station sold her gas."
I pour coffee into a mug hand-thrown by a ceramicist in Telluride whose work has a two-year waiting list, a gift from my uncle for my thirtieth birthday, because the Aldriches don't give gifts so much as issue reminders of what good taste looks like. The coffee is black, hot enough to burn, and I drink it that way on purpose. The small, controlled discomfort of it keeps me focused.
"I know," I tell him. "I texted her last night. We're meeting at ten."
A pause. With my uncle, pauses are their own language. This one translates roughly to:I'm recalibrating my opinion of you, and you should be concerned about which direction it's moving.
"At the house?" he asks.
"She suggested it."
"Of course she did." Another pause, shorter. "June's daughter. She'll be sentimental about the property. Use that."
"I'm the attorney for the estate, Uncle Ward. I'm going to review her mother's will and discuss the disposition of assets."
"You're going to get her to sell."
The line goes dead. Ward Aldrich doesn't say goodbye for the same reason he doesn't say hello. He considers both a waste of breath, and Ward has never wasted anything in his life except other people's patience and, on occasion, other people's lives, though that second category is something the family discusses only in the abstract, and only after enough scotch to blur the edges of whatdiscussactually means.
The thing about Ward that makes him dangerous, more dangerous than people realize, is that he can also be extraordinary. When my parents died in the car accident on the pass road, I was twelve, and Ward drove to the hospital himself, sat beside my bed for three days without sleeping, and read me the entirety ofTreasure Islandin a voice so gentle I didn't recognize it as his. He held my hand during the funeral. He told me I would never be alone.
And he meant it, in his way, the way a man means it when he's offering you a place in a machine and calling it a family. The kindness was real. The cost of the kindness was also real, and I didn't understand that part until much later.
I set my phone on the marble counter and drink my coffee and look out the floor-to-ceiling windows of my house. My house, technically, though the Aldrich family trust holds the deed, which means it's my house the way a corner office is your office: yours to use, never yours to own, and removable the moment you stop being useful.
The view is spectacular. The San Juans in early morning light, the peaks already dusted white, the valley below still in shadow.
The house itself is less a home than a display case: floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, polished concrete floors that reflect the sky, furniture placed with the geometric precision of pieces in an art gallery. Everything in it is clean and cold and deliberately chosen, and nothing in it makes a sound. I removed the clocks years ago because the ticking bothered me. I don't own a television. The refrigerator is a model engineered to run silent.
The quiet in this house is not the absence of noise. It is a project, something I built and maintain, the aural equivalent of the view: controlled, beautiful, and completely empty of life.
Wicked Falls sits in the valley like a jewel in a velvet box, every roofline and church steeple and cobblestone street arranged with a precision that suggests someone designed it to be looked at from above.
Someone did. My great-great-grandfather, Elias Aldrich, who built the original family estate on the highest point of this ridge specifically so he could watch the town he'd created. The house I grew up in, the house my uncle still occupies, is that estate: stone and timber and over a century old, perched above everything, because Elias believed that altitude was a metaphor for authority and my uncle believes Elias was right about everything. My house is newer, built below the estate when I turned thirty, a consolation prize wrapped in glass and concrete. Close enough to the family to be useful. Low enough to know my place.
I shower, dress, and spend twenty minutes reviewing June Holden's estate file, which I've already memorized but which I review again because preparation is the only form of control I trust completely. The will is straightforward: everything tothe daughter, Greer Holden, age thirty, currently residing in Portland, Oregon. The property, the house and the land, is unencumbered. No liens, no debts, no complications.
