3
Rynna
Why am I doing this?
Anxiety convulsed through my nerves as I waited for my computer to fire up. The truth was, I couldn’t not know. I connected to my hotspot and logged on to Facebook. It felt like forever while I sat there, the screen churning, lighting up like a window to the past. I could almost feel it stretching its fingers out to touch me. To tease me with the control it’d held over me for so long.
For too long.
Fingers trembling, I managed to type the name into the search bar. A task I’d attempted at least twenty times before I’d set out on my journey back home. I had never found the courage to press enter.
Today, I did.
She was the third listing. A grainy picture. Almost indistinguishable. But I knew it was her.
Missouri.
She lived in Missouri.
I slammed the lid down.
That was all I needed to know.
As long as she wasn’t here? I could totally manage staying in this town.
* * *
“Tell me you’re miserable without me.”
Laughing quietly, I flitted around the kitchen on my bare feet. My cell was pressed between my ear and shoulder as I slowly unpacked the few things I’d brought. I hadn’t needed much since my grandmother had left everything she owned to me.
“Completely miserable,” I told Macy, letting the tease wind into my tone as I hiked onto my toes to set my favorite Christmas mug on a high cupboard shelf.
“Huh. That’s weird. I haven’t even noticed you’re gone,” she deadpanned.
“Says the girl who’s called me like ten times today,” I ribbed.
She giggled. “Okay, okay, I might have kind of noticed.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s just that I think the apartment is haunted.”
“The apartment is haunted? And this happened sometime in the last three days?” Skepticism rolled from my tongue.
“You know how these things work. Ghost girl has been stalking me, and the second she felt your absence, she slid right in to take your place.”
“You know you’re absolutely ridiculous, right?”
“Which is precisely why you love me.”
Affection pulsed. How was I ever going to live without seeing her every day?
“Honestly, though, Ryn. How are you doing there by yourself? It must be weird to be alone in that old house. God knows it’s weird around here without you.”
I paused to look around at my dated surroundings—the floors linoleum, the cupboards hailing from the early eighties, the beige Formica countertops dingy and faded to a dreary yellow. The décor was mainly all the trinkets my grandmother had collected over the years, and the same two floral placemats I remembered from my childhood were still on the small round table.
It was as if she’d been waiting for me to return all this time. Next to nothing had changed since I left eleven years ago.
The house needed a full renovation. That was when, or if, I ever had the money to do it. Honestly, I still didn’t know how I was going to manage to hold on to all these frayed threads, if I could come back here and take over where my grandmother had left off. If I had what it would take to breathe life back into everything she had built.
But when I inhaled? I could almost smell the lingering memory of sugar browning in the oven. When I focused hard enough, I could almost taste the tart cherries and sweet crust melting on my tongue. When I listened intently enough, I could almost hear the steadfast belief in her voice echoing from the walls.
