in front of Hannah, somber, her hands on Hannah’s shoulders. She pointed into the distance, and Hannah turned to see Uncle Stuart lingering on the embankment, waving her in. Julia leaned in, kissed her sister’s forehead, and whispered, “Find the green door.”
“What does that mean?” Hannah asked, her mind racing. What green door? There weren’t any green doors in the castle. “Julia! What does that mean?”
Julia just pointed to Uncle Stuart and shooed Hannah with her hands. She smiled, waded back into the river, lay back, her hair floating around her. Hannah turned to see Uncle Stuart, arms waving frantically now, and glanced back at the river. Julia was gone.
Hannah followed Uncle Stuart back up the embankment, up the path, back to the pool, through the courtyard garden, in through the kitchen door. She followed him down the hall, through the foyer, up the concrete winding stairs to the second floor, down the hallway meant for cartwheels, to the turret room, her room. He opened her bedroom door, and she paused, gazed up at him, grateful and happy to be given the gift of her sister, even if only in a dream. Grateful for a few minutes with her dying uncle the way she remembered him: loving, robust, protective. Uncle Stuart kissed her forehead, bopped the crown of her head with a gentle closed fist, and she smiled. He turned and shuffled down the hall, back to his room.
Hannah crawled into bed, curled into the curve of Huck’s body, his steady breathing lulling her back to sleep in seconds. As she drifted, she wondered, What was real?
In the morning, Hannah woke to the smell of fresh coffee and a cool swath of sheet where Huck should have been. She checked her phone on the bedside table. It was ten o’clock, later than she’d slept in years. She had an appointment with Uncle Stuart and Aunt Fae’s estate lawyer today at noon.
Hannah tossed back the bedspread and quickly but quietly eased open the door. She crept down the hall and around the corner. The door to Uncle Stuart’s room was cracked, and Hannah nudged it, peering inside. Alice would be coming soon, if she hadn’t already. The steady hiss of a breathing tube, the click of the pulse-ox machine. She eased the door shut and padded back to the bathroom in her hallway. Hannah ran the water for the shower while sending Huck thought vibes to bring her a cup of coffee. In their house back in Virginia, she could have simply called down the steps. Not so much in the castle.
The dream was just a dream, then. Of course it was, right? What else would it be? She felt silly. She had wondered quickly if Stuart had died in the night, the dream his way of saying goodbye. She’d heard stories about that. It sounded nice, actually. Hannah had never had the opportunity. Maybe that was what the dream was about: a goodbye from Julia, seventeen years later.
She stripped off her nightgown and was stepping into the shower when she noticed her feet. She sat, hard, on the bathroom tile and looked at the bottoms, the heels, one and then the other. Caked in dirt and scratched, not deep but surface cuts, painless, thin streaks of blood from heel to ankle.
Like she’d been walking in the woods barefoot.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Now
Two days after Rink found the jawbone in the woods, Wyatt knocked on the front door with a warrant, as promised. Alone this time, for which Hannah was grateful. Hannah had never understood Reggie Plume, then or now, and he always seemed to demand something of her, something unsaid and primal. Hannah knew, or could sense, even as a young teen that what lay beneath his smooth exterior was not a good person, as if at a cellular level he was put together wrong.
Wyatt brought an excavation crew and a forensic team and talked amiably to Huck, who led his team back to the spot in the woods where Rink found the jawbone. Hannah watched the two men stride across the courtyard from her bedroom window: Huck towering a foot above Wyatt, Wyatt motioning with his hands and speaking with muted purpose. Hannah felt the swirl of emotion in the pit of her stomach: fear of what they’d find in the woods, years and layers of earth being turned over and unburied, secrets exposed—amid a rush of love for Huck, who had only risen to each occasion since he’d been here with