Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I waited eight days before I found myself at the county office. This time, it wasn’t for a restraining order against my mother.
The same woman with a chain on her glasses glanced up from a stack of papers on her desk. I ground my teeth together, breath leaden.
“I need to find a burial plot,” I said. “You have those here. With death certificates.”
She stared at me. Snapped her gum. I didn’t bother to look at the clock—I had over an hour this time, and Emma was sitting in my car with the AC blowing at full speed.
The final summer weeks were upon us, when it was debatable if hell had risen from the depths of the earth to scorch us one last time.
Then by a miracle, we’d wake up one morning and realize there was a chill in the air and a smidge of humidity had been shaved away.
Soon. It meant time was passing.
I didn’t want time to pass. Not yet.
She shifted her stack of papers. “Name.”
I swallowed. “Hadrian Belfaunte.”
She turned in her swivel chair. Today, she wore a blue floral dress that swished with each step. My jaw remained locked as she rounded the corner.
When I’d searched Colleton County’s death record office, I should have guessed it would be kept here.
She returned moments later. This time, only two papers. She smacked them into the copier and punched a button. The machine coughed, whirred, then spit the papers back out.
She returned to her seat. Stamped them with a signature stamp, then handed them to me.
“Here.”
I walked away before she could close the curtains on me.
“Where are we going, again?” Emma asked. She unwrapped a stick of gum before offering me one. I shook my head. “Suit yourself.”
“A plot,” I said. Because I didn’t know what else to tell her. I just knew I needed her with me when I went.
“Did you murder someone?” She chewed her gum much gentler than the woman at the county office. “I didn’t bring my gloves.”
I clutched the steering wheel at ten and two.
Dust kicked up behind us as I followed the GPS off the main road until we met an entrance ramp for the highway.
Soon enough, we were on the straight stretch back to Stetson, and the hour and a half slowly morphed into forty minutes, then thirty, then twenty.
When I’d mapped the gravesite, I hadn’t paid much attention to the direction or the distance. Only that I needed to get there.
Questions burned in my chest. Nothing had happened at the house since Hadrian had vanished.
I waited up every night until a quarter past midnight, but no cries came.
My dreams were nonexistent—I fell asleep, then woke up.
Wash, rinse, repeat. The house renovation was coming along, but Sayer came over more often than not to sleep on my couch, and Emma had mentioned moving to Stetson when her lease was up.
“I’m hybrid,” she’d said. “What are they going to do, fire me?”
They didn’t fire her. They gave her a stipend to move to a different office—one thirty minutes south of Stetson, a lot smaller, but with only one in-office day a week. “A family emergency” she’d called it, when her supervisor asked. “I need to be close to my sister,” was her only reasoning.
“Have you heard from that hottie yet?” she asked.
I gave a hollow head shake. “No.”
I felt her eyes on me. I didn’t meet them.
Going through the restraining order process was another headache. But I did it. Because it was best. Especially when I had no plans to sell the house anytime soon.
Even if I did, I wasn’t so sure my heart could take it.
There was something cathartic about waiting every night.
A little ounce of hope that a shadow would move out of the corner of my eye, that I’d hear something that couldn’t be explained.
But I hadn’t seen so much as a curtain out of place, and neither had Emma.
I hadn’t gotten the courage to message Irene yet.
I wanted to ask her about a reversal—if maybe she could ask that forum writer if he knew the curse that might have created the door in the first place.
But our last conversation was too raw, and there was a deep, guttural feeling that the forum writer wouldn’t know any more than I did.
Because, now, the house felt like a one-way street: I was driving in the right lane and no one was at my left anymore. The sense of dread wasn’t there at all.
Once or twice, I’d thought I’d felt the pressure from before, but it never lingered long enough for me to tell. I truly felt like whatever had kept Hadrian in the house had broken when his remains had been ruined.
I can fix it.
You can’t fix me.
He was right. I couldn’t.
Hadrian hadn’t needed fixing. Because loved ones didn’t need to be fixed. They simply were.
Maybe Mom would reach that point one day, too. Where she found the solace she needed to heal from the inside out.
Emma and I finally pulled onto another dirt road—nothing more than two paths for tires, long since dried to nothing but dust and pebbles. The sea oats were high and packed on either side of the SUV, brushing up against us like fingertips, and I thought we might be close to a shore or marsh.
“Isn’t the Uroahs’ farm back that way?” Emma pointed off to the right, straight to a tree line that grew inland. We’d gone to school with the Uroahs’ youngest, Melony.
“Maybe,” I whispered.
We bumped over a small hill. Emma held onto the handle above her door, while I craned my neck to see over the wheel. The grasses broke apart into a flattened area, and sure enough—the soggy glint of marsh dissolved into a river just beyond.
The flattened area was trimmed, though not recently. A little wrought-iron fence, eaten with rust, guarded the plot.
I eased to a stop. The plastic bag in my pocket felt unnaturally heavy.
I glanced to the papers stuffed between my console and my seat. Then the GPS, just to make sure.
This was it.
“This … is not far out of the way,” Emma said, cautious. She turned to me. Her white tank slipped off a shoulder, exposing her bralette. “How did we not know this was so close to the house?”
It was about four miles up the road.
“Because it used to be part of the property a long time ago,” I said.
Emotion clogged my throat. “I’m sure someone’s responsible for keeping it mowed.
” There was no telling who’d taken ownership of the family cemetery.
For all I knew, it could be the county, since the house was a registered landmark.
Emma watched from the passenger seat as I climbed out first. I pulled the little box where Hadrian’s teeth had been stored out of my pocket and clutched it in my fist, so hard it pressed against the bones in my hand. Finally.
Warm, welcoming air swirled around me.
This was him.
“What are you doing?” Emma scrambled out after me.
I already reached the little gate by the time she caught up, my hands gliding over the arrowed points of the fence.
I wiped away a few cobwebs. The grass hissed around us in welcome, but the slow gurgle of water in the distance calmed it, calmed me.
“I need to find someone,” I whispered.
“Uh … okay?” She shielded her eyes from the sun and swiped her hair off her neck. “Who are we looking for?”
The gate screeched as it swung. I propped it against a weed cluster so it stood open for us.
I didn’t say anything as I started scanning headstones—starting closest to us, then row by row, working my way back.
The most recent years were up front, and grew older the farther back I wove. One after another, I scanned the names.
“I’ll know it when I see it,” I said, soft. My hands grew sweaty, slick.
In the very back, off to the right, a little square marker, shaped like a brick, lay hugged with weeds. The date caught my attention first.
1855.
I paid no attention to the other plots. Only this one.
Only ever this one.
I knelt down in front of it. Pulled the weeds away with pops and rips until the name was visible. Some of the letters were muddled, eroded with time. Moss had found homes within the divots of the small headstone.
My breath shuttered.
Emma stepped up behind me. “Who are you—” She stilled.
I ran my fingers over the name.
Hadrian Belfaunte
Son—Friend—Husband
April 23 1855–August 8 1890
A long, swollen pause.
“Landry,” Emma whispered, her voice barely audible. “Whose grave is this?”
I blinked at the dates. His time of death hadn’t changed. The article in the paper had said 1890 of natural causes. Of course, I only had the photocopy, which I hadn’t dared to look at. It was still too painful.
Maybe there was a part of me that thought his date of death might have changed. But all it did was settle like rocks in my gut. Because if it hadn’t changed, that meant he was well and truly gone. No tangled threads left behind.
Similar to how I felt looking at Aunt Cadence’s urn, which had found its rightful place in the library on top of the mantel my mother had raided, I felt a presence. Even if he wasn’t really here. He was.
Just not really. But it was as close as I’d ever get to him again.
“You know … Hadrian?” At the time, I’d made up an excuse. I’d said he’d had a family emergency and had to leave. Both Emma and Sayer had asked what happened, if he was okay, and I’d been vague.
But now—I needed to tell her the truth. I needed to be honest.
I squinted; glanced up at her.
“What, did something else happen?” Her expression twisted, earnest. “His mom’s okay, right? Or …?”
I nodded. Took a deep breath. If I told her, there were no more secrets. No more holding my own baggage.
I needed to ask for help, even if it meant opening up a bit. Not all the way, but enough.
Tears slipped down my cheeks. The thoughts had plagued me since Hadrian left—what would have happened if I’d never come across the door?
If Aunt Cadence hadn’t passed when she did, would I have ever found him?
Would he have been left in there for another decade or two, or until Aunt Cadence sold the house for something a bit smaller when her knees didn’t love the stairs anymore?
Or would she have eventually let curiosity get the best of her, as she’d mentioned in the safety deposit box letters? Would he have found me anyway?
Or would we have never crossed paths at all?
A swell of emotion bubbled from the darkest parts of my soul.
“Em, sit,” I urged. She immediately knelt beside me in the grass and tucked her legs like we used to as children, facing me.
“I’m a little confused and you’re scaring me,” she said, attempting a tease.
I tried to smile. “I’m going to start from the beginning and you need to promise you’re going to believe me,” I said.
She nodded. “Don’t I always?”
“I mean it.”
“So do I!” She laughed. “Stop crying, you’re making me nervous.”
I rubbed the heels of my palms against my eyes. Gathered myself with an inhale, and said, “Do you remember when that book nook turned on and off by itself?”
Her expression became wary. “Yes?” She drew out the word to three syllables.
Those stupid tears started welling again. I wiped them away angrily. How could I have cried more in the last summer than I had in my whole life?
“Landry?” she urged. “What’s wrong?”
What were the words for what I was feeling? What was I supposed to say? How could I explain—anything?
All this time, everyone had left. I’d stepped back and boxed myself into this one square, waiting for the day that people decided to stand beside me. It hadn’t worked. Because I was always pushing people away.
Out of what? Fear that they’d see my insides and leave anyway?
But Emma—she hadn’t left. Sayer hadn’t left. Hadrian hadn’t had a choice. I hadn’t, either. And at the end of the day, life offered cards and paths I didn’t want. That didn’t mean I could refuse them.
This was a card I needed to keep. I needed to forgive myself for the things I’d held onto in the fear of being alone, of being left. Just like Emma and Sayer hadn’t left me.
The words bubbled over. “He’s gone, Emma. Hadrian’s gone.”
Emma’s expression softened. She leaned her head on my shoulder, then wrapped her arms around me in a bear hug. My bones pinched, but I didn’t care. I let my cheek fall on her head with a sigh.
“What? Like he dumped you?” she gasped, eyes going wide. Then, they narrowed. “What did he do? Have someone on the side? Do I need to find a house and set it on fire?”
I offered a watery chuckle. “No. No fires.” Because if she set his house on fire, we’d have been homeless.
She didn’t pull back. Instead, she only rocked with me. “Then what happened?”
I kept one hand on the headstone. “Would you believe me if I told you the house was haunted?”
She bolted upright. “There was a ghost? And you didn’t tell me?” Her eyes went wide with offense.
“Not a ghost,” I said. “Hadrian.”
I told her everything.