Her stepfather had steered the car with one hand and rested the other on the empty front seat. Trina, her mother, hadn’t made the trip to retrieve Hannah, and for the rest of the summer she rarely left her bedroom. It was after Julia vanished that her isolated piety turned full-blown zealous. Julia had been hers. A special mother-daughter bond that Hannah used to study, try to understand. Hannah and Trina had never been close. Hannah was too exuberant, too much. Everything Hannah did seemed to exhaust Trina, particularly after Julia left.
Hannah’s mother took to carrying rosaries with her everywhere, her lips always moving, her fingers rolling the black beads in small circles around the pads of her thumbs.
Now, in the early-morning light, the castle looked ethereal, a black shadow lit pink from behind. Only as they edged closer could Hannah see its age: Crumbling stone and missing mortar, sagging flashing along the roofline and dangling slate shingles. Window ledges with peeling paint in various shades of white, tan, even green, like Aunt Fae had run out of one color and just used whatever she’d found in the basement.
The basement. Hannah closed her eyes, her nose and mouth filled with the smell of rot, whether real or imagined, she couldn’t say. The maze of small rooms connected with no discernible pattern by a series of arched doorways. They’d played hide-and-seek there, convinced the rooms shifted, the house accommodating their wild imaginations. They’d tried to tell Aunt Fae once. A labyrinth in the basement that seemed intent on trapping them, keeping them hostage. Fae had laughed, waved her hand around in a circle, dismissive. “Everyone tells stories about this house; don’t feed them,” she’d warned. But the rooms had moved. As a child, Hannah was certain of it.
“Holy shit, Hannah,” Huck whispered next to her. “I had no idea.”
Of course he didn’t. He didn’t know about any of it. Hannah felt a burst of impatience with him, a quick bolt of frustration at his inability to keep up. She didn’t want to explain Brackenhill, her aunt and uncle, her family, her sister. More than not wanting to—she couldn’t.
Hannah approached the building to search for the key. She heard Huck’s sharp intake of breath next to her as she led them through a stone archway and into the courtyard. Aunt Fae had kept up the garden: green and full, bursting with color, pinks and blues. Even in the hot August months, when perennials would be wilting, Fae’s garden looked lush as spring. Dappled with birdhouses and fountains.
Hannah found the cobalt-blue flowerpot in the corner and lifted it; the brass key glinted in the sunlight. Brackenhill never changed.
Inside it smelled like a memory: damp and sweet, musty carpets and layers of perfume. Aunt Fae’s banana bread. Peeling paint along the concrete walls. Dust trapped in fluted moldings. The ceilings were uneven—barely above Huck’s head in some areas, looming over fifteen feet high in others. Their voices echoed. Rink ran in a circle, barked, the sound ricocheting off the stone walls.
“Hannah.” Huck stopped. The question unspoken. He touched her elbow. His eyebrows pinched as he searched her face. There was never a moment when Hannah looked at his face, his gray-blue eyes sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes bright with love, and didn’t feel the gentle tug of something wonderfully sweet. Love. Desire. Admiration. Even now, in this castle, her heart a trapped bird inside her rib cage, her breath sour in her mouth, she loved him. He deserved some kind of explanation, of course.
“This house,” she said, her voice wobbly and unsure to her own ears. She began again. Squared her shoulders, stood up straighter. “For five years, we came here every summer, my sister and I. From the time I was eleven to the time I was fifteen. My stepfather was a drunk. My mother was incapable. Brackenhill was . . . our sanctuary. But something happened to my sister here, and that was the end of it. I was fifteen. Julia was seventeen. She was acting so strangely that summer . . .” Her voice trailed off, her thoughts winding back to that August: Julia’s bed empty, the sheets cool, the tug of jealousy in Hannah’s core, the girl with the long red hair. What was her name? Evie? Ellie. The new feeling of a boy, the first boy, the weight and smell of him (his name she’d not forget, and she still woke up with it full in her mouth—Wyatt). Wondering if it had all started, or ended, because of a teenage boy who was loved by two girls who happened to be sisters.
“She left one day and never came back,” Hannah finished. “We fought, she left, and I never saw her again.”
“Did she run away?” Huck asked, his voice hoarse, his eyes wide. “Have you looked for her? Now, with the internet?”
“No. They found her purse in the river. She was declared dead years ago.” Hannah touched her forehead, felt the sweat beading there. Heard her breaths coming fast and tried to regulate herself.
“I don’t understand. What happened to her?” Huck pressed.
“We don’t know. It’s still an open murder case, but without a body . . .” It was a cold, clinical dissection, she knew. “Everyone suspected them. The town turned on Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart. I was never invited back.” Not that she would have come. “It was a forbidden topic with my mother. We rarely spoke about Julia. I had to force myself to just . . . move on.”
“What do you think?” Huck asked, his voice quietly insistent but also incredulous. His face still. Hannah tried to read him and failed. How strange it must be to be told information of this magnitude so late in the game.
“I think she ran away.”
She’d never said it so definitively, out loud, before. She’d thought it plenty of times. Especially in the beginning. When Hannah first left home, got accepted to Dickinson, a private liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. When her college roommates would ask her basic questions about her family, why her mother never came to parents’ weekend. She’d say she was an only child. But she’d lie in bed at night and let her mind wander wildly. She’d try to force herself down one thought path, then another. From the obvious (Julia had been killed by a stranger in the woods and thrown in the river) to the probable (Julia had run away from Brackenhill because of some secret Hannah never understood) to the downright ridiculous (Julia was in witness protection).
Senior year of college, she found herself blurting it out one late night while studying: I had a sister who ran away. Her roommate at the time became singularly focused, perhaps even obsessed, and they spent a few nights scouring Google for signs of Julia Maloney (and all her incarnations: J. Maloney, Julie Maloney, Julia Lorraine Maloney). Somewhere between college and adulthood, Hannah had accepted that version as truth.
She didn’t utter the second part, the unformed thought: She’ll come back. She’d said it once, to her mother, years ago. They’d been fighting—no memory of what about—and Hannah spat it out, suddenly, almost violently. “Julia will come back for me.” Her mother had raged, “Julia is dead! Dead, Hannah.” She threw a pot that had been in her hand, dish soap flying, and it left a divot in the linoleum where it landed. Later in her room, Hannah tried out the word: “Dead.” Felt the heaviness of it on her tongue, the finality of it. It never felt true. As an adult, she crafted elaborate fantasies about her sister returning, their reunion, a tearful homecoming, a long dinner and a shared bottle of wine and her sister—returned to her! She’d had friendships, of course, but nothing as close as a sister. Someone to know you down to your bones, every halting sigh familiar. Someone to exchange a look with that said, I know. At a joke, a shop window, a drunken man in a crowded bar. It was the unspoken things that felt the most powerful. Hannah had lost that. Sometimes she didn’t even realize how much she missed it until she saw it pass between two other women. Sisters, mothers, neighbors.