Eventually, I give up. I slide into bed, but despite how tired I am, I spend hours staring at the ceiling, watching the shadowy shape of that Styrofoam solar system as it spins in the breeze from the open window. Thoughts loop through my head on repeat. Dad. Jet. Lacey.
Riley.
Riley, who I’ve tried so hard not to think about over the past few years.
It feels like I drift off for only a moment or two, but when I open my eyes, the room is filled with sunlight, and the alarm clock on the nightstand says it’s almost noon.
The last time I slept this late, I’d had food poisoning. Dad had been in California for a meeting, and I had been staying at Lacey’s.
I always stay with the Chapmans when Dad is away. Stayed, I guess, given that the days of sleepovers are pretty much over.
Lacey’s apartment is loud and chaotic and filled with warmth. There are boisterous family dinners where her parents—both professors—dance circles around each other as they debate everything from deforestation to pop stars to how to harness reality television as a potential agent of change. There are movie marathons and cooking lessons and epic board game nights—things Lacey takes for granted because she can have them anytime she wants.
It’s so different from my own home, where Dad and I maybe eat together two or three times a week before he shuts himself up in his study to work.
The night I had gotten food poisoning, Gwen, Lacey’s mom, had stayed up with me for hours as I heaved my guts out.
I didn’t just lose Lacey when our friendship unraveled. I lost her parents, too.
I push myself to my feet and haul wrinkled clothes from my duffel bag. There’s no point in thinking about Lacey or her mom or how I’m pretty sure I miss their apartment way more than I miss my own. Once things break, you can’t just put them back together. The cracks are always there. You can’t go back.
Dressing quickly, I pull on jeans and an old Go-Go’s concert T-shirt—one that’s a little too tight but that, according to Lacey, makes my chest look fabulous. I tell myself that I’m not choosing the shirt just to see if the boy down the hall knows anything about classic girl bands or because it emphasizes certain parts of my body. That would be ridiculous.
I give the shirt a small tug, making sure it’s not clinging too much, then I shove my feet into a pair of flip-flops and head downstairs.
The nursing student—I think her name is Marie—looks up from a textbook as I step into the kitchen. “Summer classes,” she says. Her accent is different than Jet’s. The words are longer and softer. Acadian, I think. “Your aunt says you are still in high school?”
I nod.
“Lucky.”
The girl at the table can’t be more than a few years older than I am—she has to remember what high school is actually like—but I just shrug noncommittally and ask if she’s seen Jet.
“Basement,” says Sam, the divorcé, as he wanders in to grab something from the fridge.
I head for the small staircase tucked between the refrigerator and the pantry. On the way down, I rehearse what I plan to say to Jet. Things like how she could have—should have—told me the truth even if Dad didn’t have the guts. About how, maybe, I wouldn’t have been so resistant to the thought of coming back if I had felt like I’d had any choice in the matter and if they had just been honest with me from the start.
No matter how big of a mess I had caused back home, I still deserved to have a say.
“Aunt Jet?” My voice comes out louder than I intend it to; it bounces off the walls of the cavernous basement and probably startles the mice that nest down here no matter how many traps get set.
“Back here.”
Bare bulbs hang from the ceiling at regular intervals, but they don’t do much to dispel the shadows. I work my way through a maze of old furniture, boxes tied with blue twine, and steamer trunks. My aunt used to raid those trunks with me when I was little, looking for costumes and treasure.
Jet looks up as I approach. Her hair is pulled back in a loose bun, and she’s wearing a pair of paint-splattered overalls. A roll of masking tape circles her wrist like a bracelet, and there’s a black marker poking out from her pocket.
She’s managed to clear a wide patch of floor by pushing furniture and boxes off to the side. Jonathan Montgomery—the man who founded a town and named it after himself—watches disapprovingly from a nearby oil painting, his thick, dark brows pulled down into a point. The ghosts of Montgomery House aren’t crazy about being disturbed.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought it might be good to clear things out a bit. We could use the extra space.” Aunt Jet barely glances at me as she tries to drag the world’s biggest and ugliest antique desk off to the side. After a minute of trying to make it budge, she gives up.
I step forward and peer at the desk. A piece of masking tape on the corner reads SELL in big, black letters. In fact, almost everything around me has a strip of tape attached—all reading SELL, DONATE, KEEP, or TRASH. It’s like two hundred years of family history have been reduced to those four words.
“You’re selling stuff?”
She passes the back of her hand over her forehead, wiping away a bit of sweat. “Mr. Jacobs agreed to come over and look at a few pieces. He runs the antique store downtown.”
I mentally work out the ratio of sell to keep. The sell pile is winning. By a significant margin. “This isn’t just a few pieces.”
She still doesn’t quite meet my eyes. “You should head back upstairs. Have you eaten? I thought it would be best to let you sleep . . . you must have been tired . . . Aidan took the car to run an errand for me, but he should be back soon. If there’s something you’d like that we don’t have, we can make a trip to the grocery store. Or I could run out on my own, if you’d rather stay here.”
There’s a nervous, apologetic note to her voice, as though not having the right kind of cereal is some kind of affront. “I don’t need you to go to the store. Aunt Jet—what’s going on?”
With a sigh, she finally meets my gaze. “I’m thinking of selling the house.”
“What? How can you sell Montgomery House? Where would you go?”
The words come out fast and loud, and Jet immediately glances toward the ceiling as though worried someone upstairs might have overheard. Voice notably softer than mine, she says, “I thought maybe I’d rent an apartment nearby. Someplace where I could still be close to the river. I don’t really know where else I could go.”
I try to picture my aunt and Brisby in a small one-bedroom a stone’s throw from the house she grew up in. “But Montgomery House is your home. It’s the family home.” Sure, it doesn’t belong to me in the way it belongs to her or even Dad, but it’s always felt at least a little bit mine. I may have spent years telling myself I never wanted to come back here, but I always wanted there to be a here that I could come back to.
“Between maintenance costs and the property taxes . . . there’s just not enough money to keep things going.”
“What about the tenants? Aren’t you getting money from them?”
“Not enough. The roof is leaking, the wiring is ancient, the whole heating system needs to be overhauled. These big old houses need a lot of attention. They need resources I just don’t have. Your father tried to warn me.” She bites her lip and twists the circle of masking tape around her wrist. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him . . .”