Page 46 of The Next Lie

“I do,” I say, my voice sounding distant, like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. “I need to see the closet, Ever. I need to see the stairs. I need to know if I remember what happened here, or if I only remember what my brain could survive.”

I push the door. It doesn’t move at first, held shut by years of grit, neglect, and the sheer weight of the past, but then it gives with a violent, screeching shudder. The interior of the house is a cavern of deep shadows and dancing dust motes, the air so thick with the smell of mildew and stagnant time that I have to cover my mouth.

I step over the threshold, and for a second, the world recalibrates with a dizzying snap.

I’m not twenty-two anymore.

I’m seven.

The floorboards are clean. The lights are on. The phone is pressed to my ear, and the operator keeps telling me to stay quiet, sweetheart, help is coming.

Somewhere below memory, the house waits.

And up that staircase and at the end of the hall, so does the closet.

CHAPTER TEN

REVA

The foyer swallows me whole.

It isn’t just the dark; it’s the way the air feels stagnant and heavy, like it’s been holding its breath for fifteen years, waiting for someone to come back and finish the exhale. I take one step, and then another, my boots crunching on a layer of grit and broken plaster that sounds too much like bone grinding against bone. The floorboards are warped, bowing under my weight as if the house itself is trying to decide whether to support me or let me fall through to the crawlspace below.

Ever is a solid, silent presence at my shoulder. I don’t have to look at him to know his jaw is set and his hand is hovering near the hem of his shirt, ready for a threat that hasn’t lived here in a decade and a half. His cedar scent is a sharp, grounding contrast to the cloying scent of wet rot and ancient dust. He doesn’t say anything to break the silence, and for that, I could kiss him.

“The wallpaper,” I whisper, my voice catching on the dry air.

It used to be cream with tiny blue cornflowers. Now it’s a jaundiced yellow, peeling away from the drywall in long, jagged strips that look like scorched skin. I reach out, my fingers trembling as I brush the surface. The texture is chalky and cold, leaving a smear of gray dust on my fingertips.

The physical contact is a mistake.

It’s a tether, pulling me back to a version of this room that was full of light and the smell of my mother’s lavender floor wax.

“Reva,” Ever says, his voice a low vibration that I feel in my teeth. “Stay behind me. The floor might not be stable.”

“I know where the soft spots are,” I tell him, though that’s a lie.

I know where the floor gave a little when I was seven. I know where the vent used to rattle when the heat kicked on, and I know exactly which stair squeaked if you didn’t step on the far left side. I move toward the staircase, my heart a frantic, uneven pulse in the base of my throat.

I’m not an EMT right now. I’m not a woman hunting a ghost with a rosary tattoo. I’m just a little girl who forgot to say goodbye.

The banister is thick with dust, the mahogany beneath it grayed and dull. I climb the stairs, each one a groan of protest from the wood. Ever follows, his footsteps heavier than mine, more deliberate. He’s watching the shadows in the corners, the places where the boarded-up windows let in thin, sickly slivers of gray light. He isn’t looking at the ruins; he’s looking for what might be hiding in them.

It’s what he does.

He guards. He monitors. He exists in the space between the danger and the person he’s decided to keep alive.

We reach the upstairs landing, and I stop.

To the left is the master bedroom. To the right, the bathroom with the clawfoot tub where Delia and I used to make bubble beards. Straight ahead, in the master, is the closet.

It’s a small, unremarkable door, the white paint cracked into a thousand tiny veins.

It looks smaller than it does in my nightmares.

Everything in this house is smaller, as if the memories have been stretching the dimensions of my reality while I wasn’t looking.

“You’re shaking,” Ever observes.