Hannah never learned how to talk about Julia. She knew, instinctively, that she should, at least to Huck. And yet the words would never come. It was too easy to push it all aside, ask instead, What do you want to do for dinner? How was your meeting? Did you stop at the dry cleaner? It was easy to be distracted by daily details of life and easier still to never say a word about a past that seemed irrelevant. Immaterial to the life she was carving out for herself. In those moments she could convince herself she was a strong, independent woman. Overcoming a childhood trauma.
And the one thing she never told anyone—not the police, her mother, Wyatt, Huck. Julia had come back that night. It had been close to dawn. Hannah remembered seeing the brushstroke of pink out the window. When she tried to put a fine point on that memory, anchor it with details (What exactly had Julia said?), she found it too fuzzy. Incomplete. Then she wondered if it had really happened. She doubted her own memories of that summer at every turn.
She couldn’t have said whether it was the fighting with Julia, the hazy excitement with Wyatt, the feeling of something on the horizon—something big and life changing for all of them. But Hannah had been plagued with insomnia that whole last summer. Sleepwalking all over the castle. So much of those last few weeks passed in a fever dream. What had been real?
Her sister had stood poised between their bedrooms, her hand on the doorjamb. “Hannah, please,” she’d whispered. She’d been streaked with dirt, her face pale in the moonlight, like she’d been crying. It was all Hannah remembered, the simple two-word plea, and then her sister was gone. It could have been anything.
Earlier that night Julia had said, “We are in danger here,” her voice a rush, her hair wild. Begged Hannah to come with her, but Hannah flatly refused, all her trust in her sister broken. They’d been to a fish fry picnic in town. Julia had kissed her Wyatt, and Hannah had screamed, pushed her. The fight had gotten ugly—but still, not terminal.
Hannah vaguely remembered her own anger, how she’d known that nothing good ever came from running out of the house in the middle of the night. Especially this house, teetering high on the edge of a cliff, pressed against the wind, the Beaverkill River swollen and rushing below. What had Julia said?
“We can go to the police. I have proof, okay? Come with me. We have to leave.”
Leave! Absolutely not. Hannah would not be made to leave. Brackenhill was hers, and sometimes it felt like she was the only one who knew all the house’s secrets and loved her anyway.
And then the reckless pulse of fury in Hannah’s chest as Julia turned, clicked the door shut. She had no idea what her sister was talking about, and she was tired of caring so much about one person. All her emotions invested so heavily in someone who seemed to care so little in return. The anger flooded back, the images of her sister kissing a boy, his red hair curled in her fingertips, her lips against his cheek.
She almost, almost, opened the door again that night. Her hand was on the knob. She heard her sister on the other side. “I hope you understand.”
Hannah waited until she heard silence at the door between their bedrooms. Then she inched open the door to the hallway. She listened carefully to whispering on the stairs and the patter of quiet footsteps.
Let her go, she told herself. She’s a bitch anyway.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Now
Hannah ascended the curved concrete staircase, Huck following closely at her heels, his breath warm on the back of her neck in the chill of the stale castle air. From somewhere in the distance, in another room, a fan whirred. The clunk of a wooden door being blown shut.
“I thought you said your uncle was bedridden?” Huck asked, startling at the distant slam.
“He is. That’s just Brackenhill.” It had become so normal to Hannah, the muted groans and moans of a fortress standing against the whipping wind high on a hilltop. When she was younger, the night sounds had been soothed away by Aunt Fae’s honeyed voice, and the things that had happened at night had become dreams in her memory. During the day the castle was benign, even charming. Whimsical, with its loose pieces clattering against the