summer, what happened to her sister. She’d go to therapy if she had to. She could do that. Huck deserved an emotionally balanced wife, and right now, she was anything but. Her insides felt wild all the time, her mind careening like a roller coaster.
Sleep was elusive. Hannah had started going to bed early right after Huck left—three days ago, or was it four?—sometimes around nine o’clock, her body exhausted. She woke up several times a night, her heart pounding, blood running fast in her veins. Visceral dreams—not nightmares but something more real. Waking up all over the house, the yard. The other night she came to in the basement, the overhead fluorescents buzzing and flickering like a strobe. She stood in the center of the maze of small rooms, unsure how to get back upstairs. She made her way through a series of small doorways, only to realize that she was heading toward the back of the house, not the stairwell, and had to pivot and return the way she’d come. She felt fluttered fingertips against her neck, a chorus of whispers chasing behind her. When she’d finally stumbled up the stairs, heart in her throat, she’d slammed the basement door and stood in the kitchen, sweating. It had been four in the morning.
Hannah was afraid that one day soon she’d come to consciousness standing thigh deep in the Beaverkill. If she drowned, who would know? Who would find her, call the police? If she told Huck, he’d make her come home. She felt like she was making progress—more than Wyatt, perhaps, at least concerning her sister. She wasn’t quite ready to leave it behind and . . . what? Return to Virginia no better off than when she’d left? No.
But today she woke up here, in Uncle Stuart’s room.
“Do you know?” she was asking when she came into consciousness, her voice disconnected, floating, wholly unlike her own. Hannah was sitting next to his bed, her fingertips rubbing the lace trim of her nightgown. On this chair. Seemingly in the middle of a sentence. Now what?
She absently touched her hair, flying away in all directions. A brief panic, a time slip. The sense that she’d been sitting in this room for hours, not minutes, curtains drawn. Like waking up from a nap and looking at a clock in a darkened room: Was it night or day? Had she missed work? Except here, at Brackenhill, there was no work.
Uncle Stuart opened his eyes, blinked furiously, and nodded his head. He was last conscious two weeks ago. Right after she arrived. So she waited here in this impending-death waiting room. The transfer to hospice could kill him, Alice had warned. They had until Monday to decide. The facility had agreed to hold the room for a week. Today was Thursday. Friday, maybe. The days were running together. Would he die first? This was the order of the day. Yesterday Alice said his breathing was becoming labored.
He had an infection now. Probably starting from an abscessed tooth. Seemingly minor inconveniences to healthy people were fast-track death sentences to hospice patients. The day before had doctors in and out. They’d talked about transferring him to a hospital. He was on IV antibiotics, Alice reported later.
Uncle Stuart grunted, his hand lifted, and he pointed toward the closet. What had she asked him? Whatever it was, he knew the answer. He was awake. And not unconscious with his eyes open but actually awake.
Hannah sucked in a breath, her palms slick from nerves. “Hi,” she said.
He blinked at her, the ventilator hissing. His face was white in the early-morning light, with a shock of greasy gray flattened against his crown. The veins in his neck, his hands, twitched with life, even while he appeared skeletal. Hannah resisted the urge to hug him, pepper him with questions, never knowing the day he’d be conscious for the last time.
Hannah made her way to the closet door and opened it. Fae’s clothing, dresses and blouses and slacks. Not many but enough that Hannah wondered where she would have worn all this stuff. She’d never, as far as Hannah knew, held a job.
The bottom of the closet held a lockbox. She picked it up, turned, held it up for Uncle Stuart to see. He wagged his finger, like a nod, in her direction, and she brought the lockbox back to his bed. The lockbox wasn’t, in fact, locked, and a simple twist of the handle resulted in a click as