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I laughed. “That sounds like pop psychology. Made up by a podcaster.”
“It’s a fact.”
“Well please don’t sneak up on me like that again.” I smiled, hoping she noticed in the darkness. I wanted my words to sound easy, not like a complaint that she’d take offense to and run away.
She didn’t respond. I picked up my wineglass and took a sip. I wondered if I should offer her a glass of wine. Maybe she wasn’t planning to stay. As the silence settled around us, I felt my shoulders relax. I wanted to ask why she was here, but I didn’t want to scare her away, so I let the silence continue for as long as she needed.
“I wanted you to read this poem.” She handed a sheet of paper to me, filled with neat cursive writing.
“It’s too dark.”
She pulled out her phone, turned on the flashlight, and shone it on the paper. Before I could start reading, she said, “The man I loved disappeared from this house.”
The paper fluttered as my hand trembled. “Who was that?”
“Read the poem.”
I started reading. I couldn’t make much sense of it. There were a lot of descriptions of the woods and the lake, her broken heart compared to the thunderstorm, the emptiness of her life mirroring the bodies of the rabbits—devoid of life. At the end, it talked about four monsters invading her space, bringing destructive energy with them, taking what was hers, delivering death.
Between what she’d said and the poem, it sounded like she was accusing us of killing her lover. Did she think we killed Todd?
FIFTY-THREE
TODD
Recent Past
You could call it a vision. You could call it desire. A longing that had transformed itself into a burning belief. You could call it pure greed, or covetousness, or outright entitlement. I didn’t care what anyone called it. And for the most part, no one knew anything about it, so it didn’t need a label. I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone.
The bottom line was—that house belonged to me.
When I saw it from the street—all that glass and contemporary brick, the peaked roofline but still with a modern feel because of the section at the center where the roofline was flat, contrasting brilliantly with the rest. The house reflected me—complicated yet sleekly simple at the same time.
Inside, the living room had a sweeping view of old growth trees. The balconies off the second-floor bedrooms and a few spots on the main deck offered small glimpses of the stunning, deep blue water of Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada mountains surrounding it.
Stepping into the living room flooded me with calm. Like I belonged there. I’d never owned a home, and this one had been worth the wait. Maybe getting shut out, kicked out, the sense of being displaced and excluded from the home I grew up in had all been worth the wait.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It felt as if the design and decor came from the mind of someone who knew me. It honestly felt as if they’d thought about who I was and what I wanted in life, then designed this house to be built around me—the cornerstone.
I should have owned this house. It was mine!
The truth was, in a way, it had been designed for me. It was built for the woman I loved. And because I loved her and she adored me in return without reservation, the pieces of ourselves that connected us had already been part of her. So when the house was designed, those parts of me were taken into account.
We sat on the back deck and dreamed of the nights and days we would spend here. We even talked cautiously about filling the extra bedrooms with children instead of guests. It was all ours. A place where we could, where we would, shut out the world.
The only problems came from her mother. Linda had a lot of money she needed to put to good use. She’d bought the property next to her house to ensure their privacy and seclusion. She sketched out her ideas, handed them off to an architect, and then watched her vision come to life.
She promised the house to her daughter.
It wasn’t purely out of generosity and love. Linda wanted her daughter close by, within eyesight. She knew it wasn’t right for Jordan to live in the same house with her mother forever, but right next door would be perfect. The problem was, she wanted Jordan’s love to belong exclusively to her. She wanted lifelong devotion and attention from the sweet baby girl who’d been the center of Linda’s life since the day she was born.
Linda aimed to do everything in her power to keep Jordan from running off with some man. A man, any man, was guaranteed to abuse her. He would diminish her and take advantage of her. Eventually, it was also guaranteed that he would break Jordan’s heart. That’s what men did, in Linda’s mind, and Linda would do anything to keep Jordan from starting a relationship with a man like me. No matter what it took, or how far she had to go, she would remove me from Jordan’s life.
FIFTY-FOUR
SAMANTHA
I could hear Jordan breathing beside me. Was she breathing harder? Louder? I was sure she was. The louder her breathing became, the more it felt as if she was readying herself for something, sucking oxygen into her lungs, building up adrenaline in preparation for attacking me, strangling me with her delicate hands, one of them made freakishly strong by her constant writing. She gripped the pen as if she wanted to squeeze the life out of it.
