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It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense, and I was so very tired of feeling lost. Still, he had promised me something, and I hadn’t forgotten it. My dad. He was going to tell me all about him one of these days. That was the thing about Nathan that I did think was true. I thought that he was going to tell me who my dad was. It might not be in the way that I wanted him to, and it might not be at the time when I wanted him to, but he’d tell me. He’d stay true to his word.
At least, I thought that he would.
And so I walked up the stairs to the mansion. Despite the fact that the building looked wildly abandoned and uncared for, the steps weren’t creaky or broken. Apparently, someone had maintained the property quite well. They had taken care to make sure that everything was as it should be, and that nobody was going to die walking up the front stairs.
When I reached the door, I looked at it. This was the last door Locke’s sister had ever walked through. It was the very last place she’d ever been. Whatever happened to her had happened here, and I was about to be in that same place. I reached for the knob and turned, and then I pushed the door open.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the pristine interior of the mansion. While the outside had become decrepit and had fallen apart, the interior of the space seemed to be perfectly preserved. I walked inside, looking around. I bit back a gasp.
The inside of the mansion was a beautiful bright whit. I stared at the lovely staircase, not quite sure why I was looking at something so fantastic. There were two separate starts to it: one on each side, and then they met up top in the center of the room to form a little balcony. Straight ahead was a huge, wide hallway that presumably led to other rooms: probably a kitchen, and maybe a sitting room. To either side of me were closed doors, but none of that mattered.
Nathan Locke appeared at the top of the double staircase.
“You made it,” he said.
“Why are we here, Locke?”
“That’s Mr. Locke,” he said.
Only this time, there wasn’t any snap to his reprimand. This time, he almost seemed sad when he said it, and I knew why. He’d been thinking about her: about his sister. He was here, in the place where he lost her, and he was sad.
I started moving before I could convince myself that it was a bad idea. My feet carried me up one of the staircases to him, and then I wrapped my arms around him. At first, he stiffened, not used to this kind of raw gesture: especially from me.
We might be fooling around, but we weren’t affectionate. Not like this. He hesitated, but after just a moment, he seemed to relax, and he wrapped his arms around me, too. We held each other for a long time, and then I pulled back and just looked at him.
Locke looked like he’d aged overnight. He looked tired, and he had dark circles under his eyes.
“Why are we here?” I repeated my earlier question.
This time, he took my hand, and he led me down a side hallway. We passed a couple of closed doors, and a couple of open ones. From the quick glances I had inside, it seemed like this part of the house was just as perfect as the rest.
So what had happened here?
Finally, we reached a set of glass pane doors, and he pushed them open and led me outside.
“I left the office because I had a call from the police about trespassers,” he said. “They were gone by the time I got here.”
“Trespassers?”
“I own the property,” he said. “I bought it.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Because Rebecca died here.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad you aren’t playing coy. I figured you knew by now what had happened to her.”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “But Amber told me a little bit.”
“Amber is a good person, even if she does have a big mouth,” he said.
“She doesn’t have a big mouth.”
I felt the need to defend Amber even though we didn’t know each other very well. We definitely weren’t friends. I couldn’t use that word to describe our relationship, and yet...
Well, she was a fellow woman. I felt an obligation to make sure that she was treated right even when she wasn’t around. I wanted her to be respected and cared for. That was important. It was wildly important.
