Chapter 2 The Girl in the Closet

Garrett's POV

Something hits the floor upstairs hard enough that I hear it from the bottom of the staircase, and my first thought isn't worry. It's an annoyance.

This house used to be quiet. My dad works late, Caleb says I live like a ghost, and I liked it that way. Now there are boxes stacked in the hallway that don't belong to me, and somewhere down that same hallway is a girl I've spent three years successfully not thinking about, and apparently she's already breaking things on her first night here.

I take the stairs two at a time, ready to tell whoever made that noise to be careful, this isn't a dorm room, when I see the hallway closet standing wide open. And there's Paul Sutcliffe, frozen in front of it, holding something against her chest like she just got caught stealing.

She doesn't look annoyed. She doesn't look embarrassed either, which is what I expect, because in three years of watching her duck through hallways at school, embarrassed is the only way I've ever really seen her. She looks like she just saw a ghost. Her face has gone pale in a way that makes something twist in my own stomach, even though I have no idea why.

"What are you doing?" My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. I'm tired. I just spent the whole reception smiling for pictures I didn't want to be in, watching my dad slow-dance with a woman who isn't my mom, and I do not have the patience tonight for whatever this is. "That's not your closet to go through."

"I was looking for a box." Her voice shakes on the word box. That's the first thing that tells me something's wrong. Paul Sutcliffe does not shake. I've watched her stand completely still through things that would have made anyone else cry, three years of small cruelties she's never once let show on her face at school. Whatever just happened in this closet shook her more than anything I've ever seen happen to her in a hallway at Westbrook.

She shifts on her feet, and I catch a glimpse of yellow paper before she yanks it behind her back so fast her elbow knocks against the closet door.

"What's that?"

"Nothing." She says it too fast. "Old paperwork. My mom's stuff. It's boring, you wouldn't care."

I would care. I don't know why yet, but every instinct in me says I would care a lot, and that makes me take a step closer instead of walking away as I should. As the old deal between us says, I should. We agreed without ever saying it out loud, not to talk to each other at school, stay out of each other's way at home, and make this easier for our parents by making it invisible for us. I've kept that deal for exactly one night so far, and I'm already about to break it.

"You're a really bad liar," I say.

Something flickers across her face. Not fear exactly. More like she's deciding whether to fight me or run, the way you'd watch someone corner an animal that doesn't know yet if it's stronger than you or not. For three years, Paul Sutcliffe has been background noise to me. A girl who sits two rows back in AP Lit, who never raises her hand even when I know she has the answer, who I've maybe spoken six full sentences to in my entire life. I never really looked at her. Not all the way. Not like I'm looking at her right now, with her chin lifted and her eyes daring me to push harder, as she might actually do something if I do.

"It's nothing that concerns you," she says.

"It concerns me if it's in my house."

"It's not your house. It's barely been your house for six hours longer than it's been mine."

That lands somewhere I don't expect it to. She's right, and I hate that she's right, and I hate more that some small ugly part of me wants to know what could be in a stack of old paperwork that would make a girl who never shows anything on her face look like the floor just opened up under her.

"Show me," I say.

"No."

"Paul."

Her name comes out of my mouth strangely. I don't think I've said it out loud more than once or twice in three years, and saying it now feels like crossing some line neither of us drew on purpose. She flinches, just slightly, like she heard the same thing I did.

For one second, neither of us moves. The hallway is too quiet, full of unpacked boxes and the sound of my dad's laugh drifting up faintly from downstairs, and I am standing closer to her than I have ever stood in three years of barely existing in the same building. She smells like cardboard and something flowery, and her eyes are doing something complicated that I can't read, something between fury and fear, and for one stupid second, I forget that I'm supposed to hate having her here at all.

Then she steps back, fast, like she felt it too and didn't like it.

"I'm tired," she says. "It's been a long day."

She turns to walk past me toward her room, and that's when the folder slips. Just an inch. Just enough that one page slides loose from behind her back and drifts to the floor between us, face up, before either of us can catch it.

I see my father's name in bold black letters at the top of the page.

Right next to it, in smaller print below a date that makes no sense at all, is a single line that stops me cold where I stand: a payment authorized to keep someone quiet about the night Margaret Holt left town.

My mother's name.

Paul freezes. I freeze. And the only sound in the entire hallway is my own heartbeat, slamming louder than it has any right to, because the page in front of me is dated two years before tonight's wedding, and my mother didn't leave town two years ago.

She died.