He nodded as he glanced around again. “Are you going to give me a tour of the place?”
“Not much to see.” I hauled myself to my feet and motioned around us. “Living area, couch, bookshelves…” I stepped past him and gestured down the hall to our left. “Bathroom and bedrooms are that way.”
Penny peered into the murky darkness. “How many?”
I hung back, not wanting to revisit any more unpleasant memories of this place while I was stillstruggling to recover from the first one. But I had a feeling Penny’s curiosity wouldn’t be sated until he saw it all.
“Two,” I replied.
He nodded. “Good. No one has to sleep on the floor.”
The thought of either of us sleeping in my father’s bed made me feel physically ill. Not that the prospect of tucking myself into my old bed was any better. Every night I’d spent in that room had been its own form of torture.
“You can have my old room,” I told him. “I’ll take the couch.”
Penny turned back to me with a puzzled look. “But there are two bedrooms. Two beds. Why would you sleep out here?”
I crossed my arms over my chest as if I could hold in some of the discomfort that being in this house gave me. “Neither of us is going into my father’s room, and I don’t particularly want to go back into mine. So, I’ll take the couch.”
He didn’t push it. Instead, he started down the dark hallway and paused between the closed doors. “Which one was yours?”
I came up behind him and pushed open the door on the right.
Stepping inside, he looked around, though there wasn’t much to see. An unmade bed was pushed up beneath the window with a small table beside it, a dresser with its empty drawers hanging partway open stood across from it, and a stack of dry-rotted wood sat beside the fireplace. There were no personal effects.
It was as stark and cold as my father had been.
“I guess he cleared it out after you left,” Penny remarked after turning a full circuit.
I leaned against the doorframe. “Nope. This is exactly how I left it.”
“But there’s nothing here.”
I turned back down the hall toward the rear of the house and called over my shoulder. “Eeus is the god of scarcity, and my father took that to the extreme. There’s nothing there because Ihadnothing. I was soft enough as it was without being spoiled on top of it.”
“Soft?” Penny laughed as he followed me. “Were you ever soft?”
“To my father, I was.”
Penny caught up to me as I entered the cramped kitchen. The empty cookstove sat beside a large window on the back wall that overlooked a small, rocky yard. A counter ran beneath the window with a sink at the far end, above which was a small two-door cabinet with two cracked teacups hanging underneath on little metal hooks. In the corner opposite the cookstove sat a table barely big enough for two, and along the interior wall hung a small assortment of iron cookware that had seen better days.
“This is…” He seemed to mentally grope for the word.
“Miserable?” I supplied, and the look Penny turned on me was more compassionate than I deserved.
“You grew up here.”
It was my turn to avert my eyes. “Lived here for eleven years.”
I remembered his family’s cozy farmhouse, vibrantly teeming with life and affection. Between his doting mother and teasing sister, it was clear that Penny was loved. I had watched the three of them flit around a kitchen that was so much like this one and yet simultaneously so different that it seemed foreign. It was like they were putting on a show I could observe but never be a part of. How could I not be jealous of that whenthishad been my life?
I should have left him at the farm. He had everything I ever wanted, yet I’d brought him here. I knew what we’dface in the next few days or weeks while we tried to get Penny’s father’s bones back. I knew, too, why so many people on the list of contacts I’d supplied the interrogator, Luca, were no longer around.
There was no guarantee that Penny or I would live long enough to do what we came here to do if our true intentions were discovered. It was more likely I’d leave Sayla and Amelina with a farm they couldn’t maintain. I doubted they would get much help from the infamous Merrick if Penny wasn’t around to push for it.
The silence stretched while Penny examined the corroded pots and pans.
“There’s a forge in town.” I stepped in beside him and plucked the least-worn frying pan from the wall. “Hopefully they’ll let me use it to either repair these or make us some new ones.”
