AllFreeNovel
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It’s all there.
Sitting at the bottom of the toilet.
My makeup bag, my hair straightener, hair ties, expensive face cream, even my fucking toothbrush. Anger stirs in my stomach as I roll up my sleeves to fish my stuff out.
Oh, it’s on.
* * *
There are nine bedrooms in the Richardses’ house. Nine bedrooms, and I’ve been inside all of them. All of them except one.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Lexie, who’s been crying in front of the frosted French doors on the second floor for the past ten minutes. I’ve found her here twice in the past three days, whining at the door for hours on end.
This is the only room I didn’t go into when I gave myself a tour of the house. Finn had plastered a less than welcoming sign on the door, and I wasn’t trying to incur his wrath after he’d just used my clothes as lawn fertilizer.
Curiosity grabbing a hold of me, I rip off the sheet of paper my lovely housemate stuck to the door.
How to enter this room in one easy step.
Step one: Don’t.
On any other day, I would heed his warning, but I just spent an hour sanitizing my things after pulling them out of the toilet, and I’m feeling vindictive.
Hesitantly, I pull on the black knobs, sucking in a breath when the doors creak open. Lexie charges inside the room, and the million scenarios I cooked up come to a screeching halt.
I was wrong.
It’s not a bedroom.
An impressive oak desk sits in the center of the room, a sewing machine and a handful of stackable storage bins on top of it. The wall facing the entrance is painted a gorgeous cream color, and a rustic jewelry organizer is mounted to it.
Colorful necklaces, bracelets, and rings hang from the organizer’s hooks, and a fabric roll rack is fixed to the wall on my right.
The jewelry slash sewing room is illuminated by end-of-day sunrays peeking through the window, the dust particles in the air visible to the naked eye. I can tell from the look of things that the room has been kept clean over the years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the maid was the last person in here.
I venture deeper into the room, soaking up a memory I know doesn’t belong to me, and skim the pad of my fingers over the fabric rolls on the wall.
A small letter is engraved into each roll.
N.
N as in…
Nora Richards?
I know I shouldn’t be in here. Odds are, if Finn finds me in his mother’s office, I’m as good as dead, but there’s something fascinating about a moment frozen in time.
A story you can still read long after it ended.
I wonder what kind of mother she was, if this was her job or just a hobby, if she’s the one who made the silver chain her son never takes off.
The storage bins on her desk contain wire cutters, precious and semiprecious stones, clasps. All the tools you need to make jewelry.
I glance over to see Lexie huddled up in a velvet dog bed by the window. It looks natural to her, like a habit she never grew out of. The thought of her lying there while Finn’s mom worked all those years ago makes my chest tighten. I feel like an imposter when I sit down on her leather office chair. Like I’m trapped in a dream she never got to wake up from.
But my dads always told me you can create something beautiful from even the most devastating stories. So, with my heart in my throat, I reach for the storage bins on Mrs. Richards’s desk, remove the lids one by one…
And create.
