Page 29

Then she folds her arms. “Also, technically, it’s my house.”

Ah, yes, that small detail. I’d almost forgotten.

I look around again. The house I built. The house I paid for. The house I was condemned to haunt.

And now it belongs to a woman who wears ridiculous T-shirts and drinks wine with gargoyles.

“How did you come to own it?” I ask.

April drops onto the sofa. “My great-aunt Eleanor left it to me.”

“Eleanor.” I nod. “She used to sit on this balcony in the mornings and drink tea. She never spoke to me.”

Not the way April does. But she sometimes looked at me with an expression I could never quite decipher.

“So you know her?” April asks.

“Yes.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Seriously?”

“She lived here for decades.”

“Right. Of course.” April shakes her head. “This is going to take some getting used to.”

She pulls her legs beneath her.

“I barely knew her,” she continues. “I met her once when I was a kid. I don’t even remember it. Apparently, she didn’t have any children, and I was the closest living relative she could find.”

I look at her. “Yet she left you the house?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

April shrugs. “Beats me. Maybe she liked my Christmas cards.”

“You sent her Christmas cards?”

“Every year.”

“Despite barely knowing her?”

She gives me a strange look. “Well, yeah. She was family.”

Something uncomfortable settles in my chest. Family. Such a simple word.

And yet April says it as if the meaning is obvious. As if sending a card to an elderly relative she barely knew was the most natural thing in the world.

I don’t understand this woman. At all.

“Anyway,” she says, “I figured I’d come here, fix the place up, and sell it.”

My attention snaps back to her. “Sell it?”

“Well, yeah. I’m a single woman; I can’t just live in a mansion in the woods. Alone.”

“No.”