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“Staircases don’t—”
“I put my hand on the banister to steady it, and the banister came off in my hand. Whole thing. Just handed itself to me like it had been waiting for someone strong enough to carry it out of there.”
The laugh came out fuller this time, an actual chuckle rolling up from my belly, rusty from disuse. It felt strange in my throat, and strange in the best way, like stretching a muscle that had been in a cast.
“Okay, so one bad staircase,” I said.
“One bad staircase. One bathtub that fell through the floor.”
I froze mid-bite. “I’m sorry, the bathtub what?”
“Fell. Through. The floor.” He punctuated each word by tapping the countertop. “Blade turned on the faucet to test the plumbing, the pipes made a sound like a whale dying, and then the whole tub just gave up. Dropped straight into the kitchen below. Missed Reaper by about two feet. He was eating a sandwich at the time. Kept eating it, too. Just stood there in a cloud of plaster dust, chewing, staring at a bathtub like it was rude for interrupting.”
My chuckle broke into real laughter, loud enough to make my head throb, and I didn’t care even slightly. “You’re making this up.”
“I wish I was making this up.” Drift pressed a hand over his heart. “The electrical is worse. You flip the light switch in the living room and the doorbell rings. You ring the doorbell and the garbage disposal comes on. There is one outlet in the whole house we trust, and we guard it like a national treasure.”
“Stop.” My eyes were watering. Between the laughter and the hangover, my skull was staging a protest, and I still could not make myself stop. “Stop, my head hurts.”
“The wallpaper, Phineas.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice like he was sharing classified intelligence, and his shoulder brushed mine. The point of contact sent warmth spilling down my arm. “Fourteen layers. We started peeling, and it just kept going. Layer after layer. It’s like an archaeological dig. Somewhere around layer nine there’s a pattern I’m pretty sure was banned by the Geneva Convention. Blade thinks the wallpaper is the only thing holding the walls up at this point, and honestly? I don’t want to test the theory.”
Laughter shook me hard enough that I had to set my fork down. My cheeks ached. My eyes streamed. Sitting there in a stranger’s kitchen in yesterday’s wrinkled clothes, hungover and ridiculous, I laughed harder than I had in years, and some distant part of me marveled at the sound of it, at the sheer unfamiliar sound of joy coming out of my own mouth.
Drift watched me with an expression that made my breath stutter. He wasn’t laughing at his own story anymore. He was watching me laugh, warm and steady and openly pleased, like my laughter was the entire reason he’d told the story in the first place.
“The roof,” he continued, merciless, “has a hole in it that Blade insists is a skylight with ambition. There’s a raccoon living in the attic who has clearly been paying rent longer than Blade has, and I swear on my grill, when we turned on the furnace, smoke came out of the mailbox.”
“The mailbox is not connected to the furnace!” I wheezed.
“Tell that to the mailbox.” He spread his hands. “Nothing in that house is connected to what it should be connected to. The whole place runs on spite and asbestos.”
Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I fought to catch my breath. My ribs hurt. My headache had graduated to a full percussion section, and I couldn’t remember the last time hurting had felt this good.
“Why did he buy it?” I finally managed.
“He says it has character.” Drift shook his head slowly, mournfully. “So does a serial killer, but you don’t give one your down payment.”
Another chuckle rolled through me, softer now, winding down like a music box. In its wake, a comfortable quiet settled over the kitchen. The skillet ticked as it cooled on the stove. Sunlight had crept farther across the counter, laying a warm bar of gold over our plates, over the back of Drift’s hand, where it rested near mine.
His hand was so close. Two inches of countertop separated us, maybe less. My drunk self had wanted to kiss those hands like historical documents, and my sober self, horrifyingly, understood the impulse completely.
“You’ve got a good laugh,” Drift said quietly. “Told you that before, but it bears repeating.”
Heat climbed my neck. Under his gaze, I felt seen in a manner that should have terrified me and instead just made me want to lean closer. “I’m out of practice.”
“Then we’ll practice.” He said it simply, like it was already decided, like there was a future with more mornings and more terrible house stories in it, and my foolish heart believed him for one whole shining second.
One whole second.
Then my gaze drifted past his shoulder to the clock mounted above the stove, and the whole warm golden morning shattered like a dropped plate.
Nine-forty.
Friday morning. Nine-forty on Friday morning, and I had not gone home last night. My stomach plunged so fast I felt it in my teeth. The bacon turned to lead inside me. My car was still sitting in the parking lot at Jawbones, my phone was—where was my phone—my pocket, okay, my phone was in my pocket, dead, and Ben…
Ben.
Ben had the day off. Ben had said so, on the phone, to hon. “Be there tomorrow. I have the day off.” Which meant Ben might already be gone, or Ben might still be home, standing in a kitchen, staring at an empty driveway, at shoes missing from the mat, at keys gone from the third hook. The cameras. The cameras would show me leaving at nine-fifteen last night and never coming back.
