Chapter 2 What Mother Knows

The scream cut off the moment my foot hit the stairs.

I took them two at a time, hand skidding down the banister, my heart slamming against my ribs like it wanted out. The diary was still in my other hand—warm, impossibly warm, like something alive.

I found her in the entryway.

Morwen Thorne was standing at the front door with her palm pressed flat against the wood, staring through the little frosted window like she'd seen a ghost. Her face had gone the color of old milk. Her breathing was wrong—too fast, too shallow, a bird trapped under glass.

"Mom?"

She didn't turn around.

"Mom. What happened?"

"The porch," she whispered. "Don't—don't open the door."

I opened the door.

The rain had stopped. That was the first thing I noticed. The storm that had followed us for three hundred miles was just gone—the clouds peeled back, the air washed clean and cold. The second thing I noticed was the porch swing. It was still moving.

Slowly. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Nobody was sitting in it.

And on the doormat, laid with the care of a funeral offering, was a single white flower.

It was a crocus. I knew that much from a biology class I'd mostly slept through—but crocuses bloomed in spring, and it was October, and the flower was wet and perfect and wrong, its petals unfurling like the fingers of a hand that had just let go of something.

I knelt. Reached for it.

"Sable, don't touch—"

Too late.

The stem was cold. Not chilly—cold, like the metal of a lockbox left in a freezer. I turned it over in my palm. No thorns. No roots. It had been cut clean, but with what, I couldn't say. Nothing in nature cut that straight.

And the strangest thing of all: the ground around the porch was pure mud, slick and churned from the storm, and there wasn't a single footprint leading to the door. No prints on the steps. No prints in the grass. Just the flower, and the rain-clean boards, and the swing creaking softly on its chains.

"What the hell," I said. Not a question.

"Get inside."

"Mom, there are no footprints—"

"Get inside."

I'd heard my mother angry before. I'd heard her cold, and I'd heard her quiet, and I'd heard her drunk on cheap rosé two Christmases ago when she told me she'd never wanted children. But I had never heard her afraid.

She grabbed my wrist and dragged me in. The flower fell from my hand. She slammed the door and threw the deadbolt, then the chain, then stood there with her back against the wood, her chest heaving, her eyes fixed on nothing.

"What is that thing?" I said.

"It's nothing."

"Mom—"

"It's nothing, Sable, it's just a flower, it probably blew in from—"

"From where? There's a hurricane graveyard out there and it landed standing up with no footprints? Try again."

She flinched. She always flinched when I was right.

I held up the diary.

Her whole body went still.

"Recognize this?"

"Where did you get that."

"Floorboards. My room." I stepped closer. "It's Larkin Crowe's, apparently. Whoever that is. Funny thing—she wrote my name in it. Multiple times. Thirteen years ago, before you and I supposedly left this town behind forever."

Morwen's jaw worked. I could see her assembling the lie behind her teeth—could see her sorting through the words, testing which version I'd believe. I'd watched her do it a thousand times. Report cards. Missed curfews. The question of my father.

"That was your imaginary friend," she said at last.

I laughed. It came out ugly.

"Right. My imaginary friend. Who kept a leather-bound diary. Who hid it under my actual floorboard. Who also apparently had a real last name—Crowe—which is a weird thing for a five-year-old to invent."

"You were a strange child."

"Stop it."

The word cracked through the room. She flinched again, harder this time, and I saw something in her face that I didn't expect: grief. Actual grief, raw and wet, like a wound she'd been pressing her hand over for thirteen years.

"Larkin was real," she said quietly, and then her mouth snapped shut like she'd caught herself.

"Was?"

"I—"

"You said was. Past tense." I took another step. "Is she dead? Did she die?"

"No one knows what happened to Larkin Crowe." Her voice had gone strange. Recited. Like a line she'd practiced in the mirror a hundred times. "She ran away. It was very sad. Now drop it."

"There's a tooth buried in the woods," I said.

I hadn't meant to say it. It was Orion's find, and it wasn't hers to hear—but the words were out before I could cage them, and my mother's face shattered. Not cracked. Shattered. Something behind her eyes fell apart and couldn't be put back.

"You went into the woods?"

"Answer the question."

"You are not to go into those woods. Do you hear me?" She crossed the room fast and seized my shoulders, nails biting through my shirt. "Not the woods. Not the well. Not the ridge. You stay in this house, and when I tell you it's time to go, we leave, and we don't—"

"When you tell me it's time to go?"

She stopped.

The room went very quiet. Outside, the porch swing gave one last creak and settled.

I looked down at her hands on my shoulders. Her fingers. The nails were rimmed with dirt—not the grey dust of a house left empty for a decade, but dark, rich, fresh soil. Embedded in the creases of her knuckles. There was a scratch along the inside of her right wrist, four inches long, scabbed over but still pink, the kind of scratch a wire fence leaves—or a bramble. Or a branch, pulled back, in the dark.

I hadn't noticed it in the car.

"You went outside," I said slowly. "Before the flower. When you first got here—no." I rewound the morning, the drive, the way she'd told me to wait in the car while she "checked the house." She'd been inside for eleven minutes. "You were in the woods."

Morwen let go of me like I'd burned her.

"I was checking the property line."

"You were bleeding."

"I was checking the property line."

"The soil under your nails is black, Mom. Our yard is clay."

For one long, terrible second, my mother looked at me the way I imagined she'd looked at the white deer—like something had come out of the woods wearing a familiar face, and she wasn't sure if she was meant to welcome it or run from it.

Then the mask came back down.

"Go to your room," she said. Flat. Cold. The voice she used when I'd pushed too far.

I didn't move.

"Sable." She turned her back on me and walked to the kitchen, where she filled the kettle with jerky, unsteady hands. "I'm going to make tea. And you're going to go upstairs, and you're going to put that book somewhere I can't see it, and tomorrow we're going to start looking at apartments in the city. We made a mistake coming here. That's all. A mistake."

"A mistake."

"Yes."

"You drove three hundred miles to a house you hate, told me you'd rather chew glass than come back, and now it's a mistake and we're leaving tomorrow and I'm just supposed to—"

"Yes."

The kettle hit the burner. She lit the gas with a click click click of the igniter, and the blue flame caught, and she stood there with her hands braced on the counter, shoulders trembling, and I understood with a sudden sick clarity that my mother was not going to tell me anything. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

So I did what I always did when the world shut a door in my face.

I went around it.

"Fine," I said. "Tea sounds good."

She exhaled. Relief—thin and fragile, but relief. She thought she'd won. She thought I was five years old again, and a promise was a wall, and her word was the only key.

I climbed the stairs.

I didn't go to my room.

I went to hers.

It took four minutes. Her purse hung on the closet doorknob—she always unpacked her purse before anything else, even before making the bed—and inside, beneath a wallet and three tubes of lipstick and a hairbrush wound with her own dark hair, I found a small brass key on a leather cord. It didn't look like a house key. It looked older. Handmade. The kind of key that locks a box, or a case, or a cabinet in a room you don't want your daughter walking into.

I slipped it into my pocket.

Downstairs, the kettle started to whistle.

I was halfway to my room when I heard her—not the kettle, not the gas, but my mother's voice, low and shaking, talking to someone who wasn't there.

I froze on the landing and listened.

"—shouldn't have brought her," Morwen whispered. "I know. I know what you want. But she's not the one who owes you. I am. I've always been the one." A pause. A breath. The sound of something small and ceramic being moved on the counter. "You said I had until her birthday. You said that. Thirteen years, and I held up my end, I stayed away—"

Silence.

Then, so quietly I almost missed it, my mother said the sentence that would live in my chest for the rest of my life:

"Don't let her come back. Whatever you do. Don't let her come back."

I stood on the stairs with the key burning in my pocket and my heart trying to claw its way out through my throat, and I thought:

She isn't talking to me.

She's talking to the house.