Page 77 of Summer Holiday Lifeline

“It—yeah.” He made to get up, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“What do you think might happen if you leave?”

“What? Nothing. Who? Did Myles tell you something?”

“Oh! No. Not at all. I’ve barely spoken to him, although his niece is a treasure. So… chatty.”

Steven couldn’t help a smile. “She really is.”

“But why on earth would you think Myles would betray a trust like that? He doesn’t strike me as the type.”

“I don’t, really. Just that he’s the only one I’ve ever told.”

“Told what?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Is this going in a book?”

“Sweetheart, I am a student of human nature. Any time I can find out more about how people work, I take it. I can honestly say I’m not currently writing any such book where experiences like yours factors in, but I can’t promise I never will. That’s just the nature of the beast.”

“Right.” He sank back into the chair. “So, this is going to sound so weird.”

She straightened the bangles on her arm. “I seriously doubt it, but go ahead.”

And so he told her about the strangeness of the house after his parents died. Of the darkness that seemed to overtake it. He told her of the seemingly random, but near catastrophic events whenever the house sat empty for any length of time. A small electrical fire in the stove. Frozen pipes in the basement, causing flooding too close to his father’s books for comfort. Missing shingles over the sunroom where his mother used to paint.

“Those all sound like things that happen in old houses.”

“But always when no one was home?”

She tilted her head at him. “What were you doing when they happened?”

“I was… I don’t know. I don’t remember.” But heat rose up his neck, flooding his stupidly pale cheeks.

“You do.”

“Why would it matter?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

She had a point, he supposed. But during those early days, weeks and months after he and his siblings had been on their own, he hadn’t been here. He was ashamed, still, of the amount of time he’d left Stephanie alone to deal with Jake. How often he’d run from the ghosts in the house rather than help her face them. How very much time he’d spent elsewhere. Anywhere but where he’d belonged. Where he should have been.

“If I had been here⁠—”

“What? You could have stopped shingles blowing away in the wind? Or wiring going on a fifty-year-old appliance?”

“Well, no. But.” He frowned. “Why did it only happen when no one was home?”

“Here’s the thing.” Awkwardly shifting to face him better, she picked up his hand and squished his fingers in both of hers. “You people all talk to these buildings like they’re, well, people. Like they have opinions and ideas, and agency.”

“Because they sort of seem like they do.”

“Then why on earth should it surprise you that if you treat your house like a member of your family, that it reacts like a member of your family when something goes wrong? Do you think they would only be capable of being pleasant? Happy? Only share in the good parts? Why shouldn’t they get upset when bad shit goes down?”

He blinked at her.

“And why on earth wouldn’t they try to protect you? If wiring goes bad while you’re home, so much worse things can have happened than your kitchen getting slightly scorched. You look at it like the house acting out because what? It was lonely? But what if it was the house keeping a lid on the things that might have hurt the people it cares about until those people were out of harm’s way?”

He blinked some more. “I never thought about it like that.”