rasp of the oxygen tank, the rhythmic beep of his heart monitor. She crept back to bed and woke in the morning before Huck, exhausted. At least this time she hadn’t ended up in the woods; she checked her feet and the hem of her nightgown to be sure.
Hannah hadn’t sleepwalked since she was a child, and now, suddenly, it was becoming a regular occurrence. When she googled it, she found correlations with stress and PTSD. She wondered if she was experiencing a small amount of latent trauma just from staying in Brackenhill. While she still felt uneasy in Rockwell, she was surprisingly comforted by the house, the memories of her aunt and uncle, even the memories of her sister. It hadn’t felt as traumatic as she would have expected. She felt more at home here than she ever had at her mother’s house, with the thin, mildewed carpeting and peeling wallpaper.
After breakfast, Huck took Rink back out in the woods. He’d been quiet at breakfast, his conversation surface and polite. She’d asked him, “Are you okay?” and he’d said yes, but quietly, his smile pasted on.
“You want to go.” She’d said it like a statement, but it was a question, and she held her breath.
“Whatever you need to do,” Huck said.
“I just have to find a place for Uncle Stuart, okay?”
He’d nodded and escaped outside. She resisted asking again, tugging his arm—No, really, are you okay?—because that had always seemed pathetic to her: begging to be seen. She should have told him about the sleepwalking. But he’d been oddly quiet since yesterday. Jinny’s bombshell about Ruby hadn’t helped. She’d brought it up on the truck ride back to Brackenhill.
“What do you think it means?” she’d pressed.
“It’s sad that their daughter died, Han. But it doesn’t change your childhood. Your life with Fae and Stuart. Your memories.”
It was so like Huck to paint over everything with a sunny brush. To make light of dark things. It used to be Hannah’s favorite thing about him. But here, when she needed a partner, someone to bounce ideas off, his optimism felt like a slap. It didn’t feel like support; it felt like a rebuke.
“It changes everything,” she’d snapped. Later, she’d apologized, and he’d hugged her. His mouth landed somewhere between her cheek and her ear in a distracted kiss before he disappeared outside again. He didn’t have the tolerance for this kind of thing: digging through dusty bedrooms, old secrets. His life was ordered, measured, line itemed.
When he was gone, she listened for a moment to make sure he wouldn’t return. She crept to the end of the hall, the turret room at the other end of her hallway, facing Valley Road. She tried the doorknob and found it locked, as she’d expected. The door was antique, and the lock would have been locked with a skeleton key, but despite a cursory search around the kitchen, Hannah couldn’t locate one. She found a small rusty screwdriver in the kitchen drawer, though, the wooden handle chipped and broken, and went up to jiggle it in the keyhole, pressing the tip of the screwdriver against the pin. The lock popped fairly easily, and the door swung open, banging against the wall before she caught it.
She felt immediately like she was doing something wrong. Like she needed to avoid getting caught. By whom? Alice, perhaps? Alice seemed to slip in and out of the castle soundlessly, appearing suddenly, without warning at the most unexpected moments. Well, so what? This wasn’t Alice’s house. It was Stuart’s now.
Behind the door was a child’s room, painted in bright periwinkle blue. The walls coated in a swirl of plaster, like clouds, the ceiling painted to mimic a bright summer sky. The bed had a canopy, white chenille coverlet, lacy curtains, and giant pillows with ornate ruffles. The bed held a throng of stuffed animals: bears and rabbits and puppies in shades of brown and gray. A purple plush blanket was folded neatly across a large cedar chest.
Hannah cracked the lid on the cedar chest a few inches and peered inside. Stacks of clothing and blankets. She moved to the dresser and armoire and opened the drawers: jeans and dresses and shirts and sweaters. Winter mixed with summer clothes. Small socks and little-girl panties. The armoire held the same—winter coats and bathing suits and sandals and boots. The room smelled musty, and everything was coated in a thin layer of dust. Not twenty-five years of dust—clearly Aunt Fae had cleaned