Page 299 of Taken Away

Mabel did too.

Some things, Anne had believed, never changed.

She wrapped her gloved hand around the iron handle.

Pulled.

The door opened.

For one moment, Anne stood in the darkness.

She could have left.

That was the part she thought about now.

There had been a moment.

One clean moment.

She could have closed the door, walked back across the field, and driven south.

Instead, she stepped inside.

The house smelled the same.

Old wood. Stone.

Mabel.

Thirty years disappeared before Anne reached the top of the cellar stairs.

She knew which boards creaked.

Which hallway carried sound.

She moved through a house she had once known almost as well as her own.

Then she heard Mabel in the kitchen.

The faint clink of a cup against the counter.

Mabel talking to herself.

Then laughing.

Anne stood in the darkness and listened to her sister living an ordinary life.

In Harold’s house.

At Harold’s winery.

Surrounded by everything Anne had spent thirty years telling herself should have been hers.

She had told herself she only wanted to talk.

That was the lie.

She wanted Mabel frightened.