“Not so fast. Let me try something,” she says, pulling some sort of device from her pocket.
“Rory, where in the world did you get that?” I ask, as I watch her pick the lock like an expert.
“I didn’t exactly have the easiest childhood,” she starts as she switches between metal pieces on her device and slides them in the keyhole. “Growing up, my mother was always drinking. She’d lock me out of the house all the time. Sometimes it was by accident when she would pass out cold, and sometimes it was on purpose.”
My heart sinks in my chest as she recounts this horrible childhood memory, her words falling as casually as a comment on the weather.
“So yeah. I eventually got really sick of having to find somewhere to go or to sleep that wasn’t my own bed, so I ordered this from some lock-breaking site and watched YouTube videos until I taught myself how never to be locked out again.”
She turns the device in her wrist, a faint click sounding from within, and the large carved wooden door opens.
“Ta-da,” she says with a smile as she straightens.
I pull her to me, hugging her tight and burying my face in her pink curls. “I hate that you ever had to learn that.”
“Yeah, but at least now I’m glad I did.” She pulls away and shrugs with a half smile. “Come on, let’s get inside.”
The house is cold, like that stale cold air that pierces through your clothes, no matter how many layers you’re wearing. We walk over the dusty marble floors, keeping our footsteps light as we go. Rory stops to ogle at the chandelier above us, turning as she does, like she’s trying to take everything in.
“Seriously? You used to live here?” she asks, her tone drenched in disbelief.
I laugh to myself. She’s the only one who didn’t know me before, so her surprise is refreshing in a way.
“My family lived here,” I clarify. “I stayed in one of the seven bedrooms when I was in town, but we had many houses, and I had an apartment in the city that my father paid for me to stay at mostly.”
Rory stops to stare at me, blinking slowly as she wraps her head around it.
“Jheeze, no wonder you were so angry. Going fromthisto that duplex must have felt like living in a shoebox in comparison.” She takes one more look around before joining me at the bottom of the stairs. “Do you miss it?”
My gaze trails across the room, seeing everything through a fresh set of eyes, and I smile. “I used to,” I admit, letting the thought settle. “But now? No. My duplex is the first real home I’ve ever had. This is just Thorne Lake House.” A hollow kind of acceptance fills me like I’m finally letting go.
She nods her head, and something heavy passes behind her eyes. “I get it.”
I think about what she said outside about how she grew up, how she drove all this way just to meet a brother who didn’t even know she existed, and I realize that she really does get it.
A silent understanding passes quickly between us before I nod toward upstairs.
“This way.”
With my pulse racing, we make it to my father’s study down the hall, and I head straight for his desk. I’m not supposed to know this secret compartment exists, but one day, when I came over unannounced, I marched into his office to find him with it open. He played it off, acting like it was nothing before distracting me with something else, and I eventually forgot all about it, until last night.
I pull open the bottom right drawer. It looks exactly like the rest of them, but the bottom of this one is false. Its depth is shorter, but you wouldn’t notice unless you knew or measured it.
“Is that it?” Rory asks, pointing to the drawer that I’m carefully emptying.
“Yeah, it’s this one, I just have no idea how to open it.”
I remove everything, but there’s nothing that screamsopen here.
My stomach drops, and the nerves from earlier come back with panic that fills me. What if I can’t figure out how to open this? What if I’m wrong and there’s nothing there?
“Wait, what’s that?” She points to a small hole on the left side of the drawer.
“It looks like it’s just a hole,” I say, confused.
“No way. That’s your keyhole. Which means there’s a key somewhere around here... Hopefully.”
Dread fills me. “And if there’s not?”
