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She let out a breath between her teeth. She didn’t remember, which meant she couldn’t give me the reassurances I wanted.Simon reached out, resting his hand on her knee. She’d lost her family because of me, and now it was happening all over again.
“Forty million dollars is a lot of money,” I said. “Staying here a year might not be so bad. I’m already homeschooled. And it’s not like you’d have to worry about your job. I’m pretty sure Madison Street Copy and Print can survive without its assistant manager.”
“We’re doing fine,” Mom said.
“No, we’re not. It’s starting again. Isn’t it?”
She didn’t answer, but her jaw clenched. “It isn’t your fault,” she said.
“But it is because of me.” Everywhere we went, it was the same. At first people were friendly. Mom was gregarious, beautiful, charming. But eventually, they started to avert their eyes when they saw me. Hurry past our house. “She gives me bad dreams,” one woman had said when she thought I couldn’t hear.
That was when things would start to happen. Like the rats scrabbling in the walls that the exterminators couldn’t find. Or the time we came home after only an hour away to find every surface of the house covered in fine black mold.
Like what had happened to that girl in second grade.
Sooner or later, it always caught up with us.
It all came back to Harrow and what had happened here. But I still didn’t know what thatwas—or how I could escape it.
We were at the gates now. They were open as they had been when we arrived, and beyond them the road was wide and empty. But we weren’t moving.
“Mom?” I asked. “Are we leaving?”
“I can’t,” she replied tightly.
“You don’t owe them anything,” Simon said. “Let’s just go and leave this all behind us.”
“No, I mean Ican’t.” She pressed the gas pedal. The engine revved, but the car didn’t move an inch. She threw the gear into park and then back into drive, but still the car acted like it was in neutral. “What the hell is going on?” Mom demanded.
At that moment, the engine sputtered and died. Mom swore. She turned the key in the ignition but got nothing—not even a whine of the car attempting to start. She threw her door open and got out. Simon and I followed.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“Well, according to my extensive automotive knowledge, the problem is that the go part isn’t going,” Simon said, hands on his hips.
Mom pulled her phone out of her pocket. “Let me call Caleb. We can borrow a car, or... Damn it. I forgot—there’s never any signal out here. We’ll have to walk back to the house.”
“It’s not that far,” I said, trying to sound upbeat in the face of Mom’s distress.
She looked at me, face a wreck of worry. “I’ll go. You stay here,” she said. “I don’t want you going back there. Simon, you stay with her.”
I wasn’t really eager to go back to that strange house. But I definitely didn’t want her going alone. “I’ll be fine by myself. The gates are right there. I can always make a run for it,” I joked. Twenty feet to freedom.
Mom agreed reluctantly. “Stay put,” she ordered, giving me a quick hug before the two of them headed back. I watched as theymade their way down the narrow lane, vanishing swiftly behind the trees as it bent.
The wind stirred the branches, making leaves shiver and branches rasp. I shifted from foot to foot, then started to pace back and forth. I almost didn’t see it—that slip of white among the trees. My gaze snagged on it as I turned, and I paused, trying to work out what it was.
A person.
The girl was about seven or eight years old, blond, wearing a simple white dress and no shoes. She crouched down just off the lane, her back to me. She seemed to be looking at something on the ground.
“Hey,” I called, frozen at the edge of the lane. She didn’t look up. Her shoulders moved, and I realized she wasn’t just looking at something—she was digging at the ground in front of her. “Hey, are you okay?” I called again and drew closer, uneasiness prickling at my skin.
The girl scraped up handfuls of dirt from the ground and shoved them aside, moving with frantic efficiency. I approached cautiously, a hard lump in my throat. The ground was stiff with frost, and yet she kept digging, her hands red and chapped, one nail torn and bleeding.
“Your hands!” I said, reaching for her. She turned, and I balked.
She had no face—none that I could see. There was only the crazed distortion of an ocular migraine, like a jagged crack in glass shot through with strobing light.
