She kisses him hard to cut him off, and he cradles her to him in a way that feels desperate. As if she is the comfort that keeps him from slipping back into bloodied memories.
“It messed me up for a while,” he says quietly. “The house I’m fixing up? It’s my childhood home.Theirhome. It’s pretty old, and then it sat empty for like ten years, but it was my and Ava’s inheritance, and I wanted it more than anything. I’m going to make the house perfect, and I’m going to have a wife and kids and come home to them and be everything my parents were.”
“I understand.” A strange calm has settled on her bones, and she is surprised at how level she sounds given what she’s about to say. She traces her fingers around his mouth. “I really, really do. My little brother died when he was two. I was eight.”
His eyebrows draw together, his eyes softening with their shared pain.
“He drowned in the bathtub,” she says simply, and this is the first time she’s ever talked about it. “My parents have been empty husks ever since. But there’s more. I don’t know”—she should stop, but it’s spilling out of her like poison to be excised—“anything about Jude’sfather. Just some awful boy from school I never saw again. Jude is all I have in the world, and I’m so, so terrified to lose him like I lost my little brother.”
Bren pulls her to him and she collapses on his chest, their heartbeats in sync, their bare skin so hot they begin to fuse together as if they were always meant to be one.
“I never want to be without you,” he says into her hair, and he sounds like he might cry from how deeply he means it. “Our scars match.”
“I’m the one who’s broken.” Her voice feels faraway and he is the only thing keeping her from breaking apart. “I’m unfixable.”
“No, you’re not,” he says with fevered belief. “I promise you’re not.”
She wonders if he tastes the rot of her half-truths staining her tongue as he kisses her. Or if the darkness caught between their teeth is actually all his.
EIGHTEEN
She will never leave thishouse.
This thought alone circles in her head as she sits folded in the center of the bed, listening to the walls as night thickens. The sedatives move like diluted slurry in her veins, and she is still so bone-achingly tired she could lie down and fall back to sleep. Not yet. She must hold out till Bren comes in.
In the nursery, Jude is shooting toy cars down a ramp fashioned out of old cereal boxes while Bren digs in the dresser for clean flannel pajamas and picks out a storybook. That’s how she left them, knowing there will be no meltdown at the offense of new pajamas or the fact his mother isn’t with him. She watched Bren toss Jude onto the woodland bed with an explosion noise and then swoop down to tickle him until he couldn’t breathe for laughing. His face was flushed with delight, his stomach rounded from dinner.
This man has stolen her son.
Jude January.
She won’t let it happen.
If she picks Jude up and tries to walk out the front door, would the house even let her leave? It has closed in on her, narrowing until she is a thing squeezed between the floorboards. Trapped.
She pulls up the old T-shirt of Bren’s that she slipped on and flattens her hands to her belly, her skin feverishly hot and the baby quiet in sleep. If she can mitigate the damage, draw Bren back to her and lull him with teary explanations of how she’s stressed and sick and none of her hysteriameant anything, then he will relax his grip on Jude. She’ll snatch up her son and go.
Except, she has no money, no car, no job. Everything she owns now is in the January name: a gift from him, bought by him. Terror leaves her shaky, because she did this to herself, shewantedsomeone to sweep her off her feet and take care of everything. Bren trotted back to America as a pleased golden retriever with a dead bird in his mouth, and somehow she thought it romantic. Whatthe fuckis wrong with her?
Even if she did run away, he could drag her back.
She carries his property inside her.
There is no going to the police, both because she can’t afford them looking into her and she knows how she’d sound. What are her husband’s offenses?Well, sir, he’s made my son like him better than me, and he won’t believe me that our house’s walls are bleeding.
She had looked in on them in the bath, Jude splashing around the tub, Bren sprawled on the floor accepting plastic teacups of bubbles and makingnom-nomsounds at Jude’s demand. Purple fingerprint bruises marked Jude’s prominent little ribs. She’d done that to him. It’s her fault, too, the way she can count each rib bone like ladder rungs.
In the dark of her bedroom, Elodie tries to even out her breathing.Her hair is a sheath of midnight around her, grown so long it touches the bedsheets, lank and lifeless. She can’tthink. Her sinuses are on fire and claws have reached into her skull to scoop it clean, packing the empty space with rusted nails and twigs and bird bones. This is the house’s doing, she knows it now. Things drag themselves from the walls to cut their teeth on her at night, to hover over her, tying knots in her hair and stuffing cotton wool down her throat and waiting until they can hold her under—
Stop.Those are just bad dreams that linger after she wakes.
She should never have told Bren anything about what the house is doing to her, that it’s tormenting her with wretched, murderous games. Because that’s what all of this is.
It’s always been shaped like a game.
To win, she must be the lonesome, enigmatic girl who Bren fell hopelessly in love with, who is full of wry quips and supple limbs and a beautiful mouth. Be lovely, be mysterious. Enchant him. There is no surviving herself otherwise.
A languid throb keeps up behind her eyes and she digs fingernails into her arm to stay awake. This is how she is when Bren finally comes into the room, pulling off his shirt before he’s closed their bedroom door. Then he slides an old, ornate key from his pocket and locks it.
