Chapter 1. Lenore #2
I would have appreciated it if Damien could’ve mentioned that, but I suppose it would’ve been inconsequential, in his eyes.
I never gave voice to the intense crush I harbored on my older brother’s closest friend—one of those formative crushes, too obsessive and embarrassing to ever amount to anything.
I hadn’t seen him since my brother’s wedding three years ago, where Callan drank too much whiskey and turned me down for a dance. That was the last time we were all together, two weeks before Damien and I moved our grandmother into long-term care. When the farmhouse was still hers—was still home.
It all fell apart that night. I’ve been dealing with the fallout ever since.
I comb my fingers through my hair, raking my bangs back from my forehead. They had seemed like a good idea, a couple weeks ago. “I couldn’t, um—the passcode for the lockbox doesn’t seem to work.”
“We changed it after the new buyers signed the paperwork. For security reasons.” Cal rolls his stool over to the tool chest, lifting the hem of his T-shirt to dab sweat from his brow.
Light creases are pressed into his toned stomach from sitting, and dark hair trails down from his belly button.
I make a conscious effort to look anywhere else.
“I gathered that,” I say to the rafters. “So it would be great if I could get the new code.” I risk lowering my gaze and am relieved to find him decent once more.
Cal threads a different nozzle onto the hose, tossing me a glance that crinkles his brow. “Did you call your real estate agent?”
I swing an arm through the open door, back the way I came. “It’s my house!”
He breathes a humorless laugh and shakes his head, the drawer on the tool chest rattling as he slides it shut. “The numbers are flipped around,” he says. I stare at him, wary. “2-9-7-1.”
I turn to leave, but his voice stops me in my tracks.
“Hopefully you don’t plan to stay long. It’s set to close in October.”
I look back over my shoulder. “I know that.” I make a solid effort not to sound like those words are taking the remaining fragments of my heart and grinding them into the dirt.
Callan considers me for the count of seconds before his gaze cuts away. “I have to get back to work,” he mumbles, and switches on the compressor.
I unleash a frustrated ugh that no one—not even me—can hear before stomping out of the building.
This is still my house, mine and Damien’s—for a few more weeks, anyway. It even bears my last name on the listing: French Hill Farm, a colonial farmhouse on seventy-three sweeping acres in Whitbury, Vermont.
It’s been in the French family for more than two centuries, but maintaining such a large property—and, in particular, the aging farmhouse—is expensive.
Income from running the modest ten-acre orchard has allowed us to keep a groundskeeper on payroll, but there are problems with the house itself that cost too much to fix: rotting support beams in the damp basement, knob-and-tube electrical wiring that’s waited half a century to be replaced.
I don’t understand how Gran managed this place for as long as she did.
As I follow along the back side of the house, I can picture her out in the garden like yesterday: a straw hat shading her steely braid, the knees of her overalls caked in dirt.
We would play freeze tag out in the orchard while she worked.
When the sun set, she would strip the gardening gloves from her hands, pinch her fingers between her lips, and whistle loud enough that it could be heard across all seventy-three acres.
It was a good life for a kid. The best decision my mom ever made was tracking down our paternal grandmother. It kept us out of foster care, at any rate.
The problem started when I was a little older, with wanting to be anything more than Gabrielle French’s granddaughter.
It’s impossible to outrun your family name in a small town—even our road is named after my several-times-great-grandfather.
I was a houseplant, my roots pressed up against the sides of my pot, desperate for space to thrive.
I stoop to collect the box from the porch and then punch the numbers into the keypad, 2-9-7-1. “Stupid,” I mutter when it blinks green, and I tug open the hatch to take the key. Propping the storm door open with a knee, I unlock the mudroom.
An unfamiliar scent slams into me: something manufactured, a plug-in air freshener dispensing pine and cinnamon. I brace a hand on the wall for balance as I slide out of my clogs, then do a reluctant tick check around my ankles before pushing deeper into the house.
There is a fireplace in every major room—the entire house is built around a crooked central chimney, but the kitchen is the only room where it hasn’t been bricked shut to save money on heating in the winter.
I smile at the beehive oven built into the clay brick.
I’ve missed this place. Beside the kitchen is the keeping room, still decorated in that kitschy Americana style that Gran loved, with braided rugs and a Boston rocking chair, but any signs of ownership were scrubbed clean for real estate agents to march potential buyers through.
Where family photos used to hang, now there’s folk art and framed needlework.
An ache blooms in my chest. This place is an echo of the house I grew up in, stripped of the finer details that made it a home.
I climb the curling central staircase to the second floor, wood groaning beneath my feet. A short, airy hallway is drenched in toile wallpaper, with twin doors waiting at either end. I reach for the door to my right.
The door creaks open on its own. At sleepovers, I used to tell my friends it was a ghost, but the truth is that the entire house slants ever so slightly to the east—a side effect of the earth shifting beneath it over the last two centuries.
The bedroom beyond is a blank canvas: There are no drawings taped to the walls anymore. Sunlight soaks through sheer white curtains.
I set the cardboard box on the bed atop the cream-colored quilt and fold back the flaps.
I rifle through faded Polaroids, pulpy mass-market paperbacks, a small velvet ring box, a plaid wool scarf, and a vintage watch with a mother-of-pearl face, its soft ticking the only sound to fill the silence.
I extract a leather-bound journal and turn it over in my hands.
For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with my grandmother’s observation—not in full.
Love isn’t meant to be stored in the darkest corners of the house, collecting dust. Those spaces are reserved for a specific kind of love, the sort that has nowhere left to go.
For the fragments we save to make up for the greater loss.
I don’t have an attic in my little shared flat in Manhattan, but I do have a cardboard moving box with U-Haul branding on the side, water damage wrinkling one corner.
It’s in this box that I’ve stored all the evidence of my love for my grandmother, filing away little bits and pieces even as she slipped through my fingers.
Now, that box is back here in Vermont, where it all began.
I thumb through the journal, page after page of impeccable sloping handwriting until somewhere around the middle.
After that, it’s blank. I’ve read all her other journals, lifetimes I never met her in.
It’s this last journal that I’ve been dreading, because it’s in here that I might find an echo of the woman who raised me.
I don’t know whether that’ll help, but there’s only one way to know for certain. I take a deep breath and flip back to the first entry, written seventeen years ago.