"What about your brother?"
The words come out too sharp. Gracie blinks.
"Elias? What about him?"
What about him.
Like he's not why I put eight thousand miles between myself and this town.
Like he didn't spend my entire senior year watching me from doorways, from windows, from the shadows at the edges of every room.
Like I didn't enlist one week after graduation because staying meant finding out what happened when a man like Elias Ashford stopped waiting.
"We weren't close."
"You were kids." She waves a hand, dismissing it. "And he was going through a lot back then. Mom had died, he was taking over everything—he's different now."
Different.
I remember his hand on my wrist the night before I left for basic.
His thumb pressing into my pulse point. The way his voice dropped low and certain."You'll come back. They always come back."
"He's hardly ever home anyway." Gracie's still talking, still trying to convince me. "Always working. You'll probably never even see him."
I want to believe her.
But my instincts are screaming, the same instincts that kept me alive when everything else was trying to kill me.
Don't go to the house.
But Gracie's looking at me with hope in her eyes.
And my apartment application in Charlottesville fell through for reasons no one could explain.
And the job interviews I lined up keep getting rescheduled at the last minute.
Like something is working against me.
Paranoid. You're being paranoid.
"A few weeks." I hear myself say it. "Until I find something permanent."
Gracie squeals and throws her arms around me again.
Over her shoulder, I catch my mother's eye.
Mom's watching me with an expression I can't read. Something worried.
She looks away before I can figure it out.
***
The drive to the estate takes fifteen minutes.
Gracie fills the silence with gossip. Eight years of it. Affairs, bankruptcies, weddings, funerals. The endless small dramas of a small town that thinks it's the whole world.
I nod when I'm supposed to.
