Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
“He did?” She looks over her shoulder to her husband Michael. He’s on the phone—taking orders, probably—so she just looks back at me. “Is it under Amon’s name?”
“I dunno. His or mine, I guess.”
Jessica smiles. “OK. I’ll go check and…”
“I’ll hang out in the gardens. There’s no rush.”
“I didn’t… I didn’t mean you had to leave, Collin. That’s not what I was saying.”
“It’s fine. I’ll be outside.”
When you kill someone when you’re eighteen, people look at you different afterward.
Jessica watched me grow up. Saw me once a week, every Sunday at brunch. She probably thought she knew me. My parents used to be invited to the New Year’s Eve party here every year. One time, when I was fourteen, they even brought me along.
So Jessica might actually have thought of me as family once upon a time.
And then, one night when I was home alone with my nine-year-old sister and my parents were right here at the aforementioned New Year’s Eve party, a man broke into our house and tried to steal my sister right out of her fuckin’ bed.
Like all boys growing up in the hills of West Virginia, I had been hunting since I was small. Turkeys, mostly. But I had gotten my share of deer too.
Lowyn was over at my house. Her house now, but still my house then. We were making out on the couch when she heard a noise coming from the back mudroom.
“What is that?”
“The wind.” That’s what I told her. And we just kept kissing.
I would think about these moments every fucking day for years.
What if I had gotten up and looked? Would I have scared the guy away? Would he have walked off, found another house with kids in it, and tried for them instead?
There’s no way to know, of course.
It happened the way it happened.
That guy broke into our house, crept into my sister’s bedroom, gagged her with his hand, dragged her out of bed and was already in the hallway outside the back mudroom when Olive was able to scream.
I don’t know if that’s exactly how it played out because obviously the guy is dead and Olive never gave a statement. She said she couldn’t remember anything but a hand over her mouth, and then she screamed, and then… then she was covered in blood.
Lowyn said she didn’t see anything. That I told her, “Stay here and don’t move,” after Olive screamed, and that’s exactly what she did.
But she didn’t stay there. She got up with me. She was right next to me when I pulled the rifle out of the front closet—I meant to get the shotgun. That part gets me every time. Because I wasn’t thinking clearly and if I had the shotgun instead of the rifle, I’d have killed Olive too. I checked the magazine, snapped it back in, and walked into the hallway with my eye looking through the sight like I was on patrol in fucking Iraq or something.
That guy took one look at me, let my sister go, put his hands up, asked me not to shoot, and I shot anyway. I hit him right between the eyes.
Lowyn saw the whole thing.
Olive saw the whole thing.
And neither of them contradicted me when I lied to the police ten minutes later.
I became another person that night. Maybe I was always that guy, maybe not. But no one gets to walk into my fuckin’ house, manhandle my fuckin’ sister, and then live to tell about it.
No one.
This is the part that gets me though… why would Lowyn want to buy that house? Why? After what I did in that hallway, why would she buy that place?
The whole reason my parents moved was to get the fuck out of there. There were bloodstains all over the wall. The carpets had to be pulled up. We couldn’t even live there for a week because of the investigation.
My parents couldn’t wait to put that place behind them. And Lowyn McBride bought it?
What the actual fuck, ya know?
And my stuff in the room? I don’t get it. But she really does have it up on her website. I checked a couple hours ago and sure enough, there’s a page titled ‘Get the Look—Retro Rock Teen Boy Bedroom’ and pretty much everything that was in my room is for sale on that page.
I go out onto the back porch of the inn and skip down the stairs, automatically heading for the hedge maze. It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t be here, but as I enter, it does occur to me and I’m suddenly grateful it is.
That’s when I see Lowyn. She’s walking the maze too, but she’s got her head bowed looking down at her phone. She stops, puts a hand over her mouth, and even from thirty feet away, I can hear her gasp.