The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,3

felt so close to the surface. When every knock at the door, every unknown caller, made my stomach plummet. But the sleepwalking, no, it didn’t happen anymore. Hadn’t since I was a child. When I was younger, I’d taken medicine, and by the time I’d stopped—a forgotten dose, then two, then a prescription that had not been renewed—I’d outgrown the episodes. It was a thing that had happened in the past. A thing, like everything that came before, that was left behind in another life, to another girl.

“Well,” he said, standing beside me on my front porch, “seems like it does, my dear.” The porch light cast long shadows across the yard.

Rick put his hand on the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn. He jostled it again, then sighed. “How’d you manage that one?” He looked at my empty hands, like I might have a key lodged in my fist, then narrowed his eyes at the dirt under my nails, his gaze drifting down to the blood on my toes.

I wanted to tell him something—about the things my subconscious was capable of. About survival, and instinct. But the evening chill finally registered on a gust of cool wind, goose bumps rising in a rush. North Carolina summer nights, the altitude could still do that. Rick shivered, looking away as if he’d be able to see the cold coming next time.

“Do you still have a key?” I asked, crossing my arms over my stomach, balling up my hands. He was the original owner of both his lot and mine, and I’d bought this house directly from him. Rick had designed it himself. At one time, it had been occupied by his son, but he’d left town a few years back.

Rick’s face tightened, the corners of his lips pulling down. “I told you to change the locks.”

“I’m getting to it. It’s on my list. So do you?”

He shook his head, almost smiling. “I gave you everything I had.”

I pulled at the door myself, imagining this other version of me. The one who must’ve walked out the entrance but managed to lock the handle behind her before pulling it shut. Muscle memory. Safety first.

The porch beams squeaked as I walked to the living room window. I tried lifting the base, but it, too, was locked.

“Liv,” Rick said, watching me peer in the darkened window, hands cupped to my eyes. I hadn’t flipped a single light switch inside. “Please get the locks done. Listen, my son’s friends, they weren’t all good, not all good people, and—”

“Rick,” I said, turning to face him. He was always seeing another version of this place, from years ago, flushed out long before I’d arrived. Before the hospital came through, and the construction, and the shiny new pavement and chain restaurants and people. “If someone was going to rob me, they probably wouldn’t wait over a year to do it.” He opened his mouth, but I held out my hand. “I’ll change them, okay? Doesn’t help with the situation right now, though.”

He sighed, and his breath escaped in a cloud of fog. “Maybe you got out some other way?”

I followed him down the porch stairs and stepped carefully through the grass and weeds as we paced the perimeter together, as if we were following the ghost of me. My bedroom window was too high to reach from the slope of the side yard, but it appeared secure. We tried the back door, then the office and kitchen windows—anything within reach.

Nothing was disturbed, nothing gave an inch. Rick looked up at the set of beveled glass windows from the unfinished attic space on the second floor, frowning. The windows were partly ajar, leading to a small balcony that was purely decorative.

I fought back a chill. “I think that’s a stretch,” I said. The upstairs was mostly unused, empty space, anyway, except for the single wooden rocking chair left behind, which was too large to maneuver down the stairs—as if it had been built in that very spot and was now trapped. A single bulb hung from the center of the exposed-beam ceiling, the only place you could stand fully upright between the slanting eaves.

There was one narrow stairway up, tucked behind a door in the hallway. The space was too enclosed, too dark, every one of my senses elevated. From up there, you could hear the inner workings of the house: water moving through the pipes, the gas heater catching, the whir of the exhaust fan. I rarely went up there,