A Family Secret by Cross Kennedy

Author:Cross, Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zirconia Publishing
Published: 2018-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

15

Claire

The hardwood feels cool under my feet as I slip my sandals off. “So I didn’t get the formal tour the first time around,” I say.

“Right, because it’s so enormous and well-furnished,” Liam says. “Hard to take it all in, I know.”

I laugh. Whatever buzz I’d gathered at the bar has been replaced with a warm energy in my chest. There’s something about Liam’s presence. He has a charm about him. It’s nothing exuberant or imposing, but tender and sincere. Liam wears sincerity like he can’t speak without it.

He’s a lot like Alison in that way. Except with Liam, it’s candid and unrefined. Alison’s words come out of thought and empathy, Liam’s come from intuition.

He humors me with a tour anyway. We begin in the living room, the first room just inside the front door. It’s the only room I’m familiar with. The entire space is hardly more than a strip of carpet, the couch where I’d sat a few nights ago, a cheap coffee table and a single chair beside it where Liam had sat. The scene resumes as we walk through it, the way the unfamiliar setting had turned into my own cocoon of an escape. The sanity it had given me.

The kitchen is even more vacant. The counters are clean and empty. There’s a cheap microwave, a stove with four burners, a sensible fridge. The place strikes me as a home that’s been rented more than it’s ever been lived in. Liam moves through it with the same indifference.

The walls of the adjoined hallway are painted an opulent green-blue shade. A shade that makes me all the more certain that Liam’s renting a place where he’s made little to no modifications. There isn’t a single picture hanging on any of the walls. His sarcasm wasn’t all that inaccurate—there really isn’t much to see.

And yet, I can’t help but compare each room to Ethan’s place in Cardinal Creek. They could not be more different. Where Ethan fills spaces with lavish, gallery-esque furniture pieces, Liam has clean and modestly empty corners. Where Ethan hangs chandeliers, Liam has open ceilings, space to breathe.

There was one time, in the first few weeks after I’d moved in, when Ethan had scolded me for putting my feet on the couch. I’d laughed. “I put my feet on the other couch,” I’d said teasingly. “I lay down on the other couch.” Still, I had swung my feet back to the ground like a young child.

“Not in this room, Darling,” Ethan had said. “That couch costs more than your dad’s car.”

How had I ever existed like that? As if every item around me had to be handled with the same caution in which I handle criminal evidence at work.

I had pretended, but I was never truly comfortable there. I’d been made to feel like a possession of the house instead of the other way around. And after a while, in a way, I even began to convince myself of it. It was extravagantly furnished but too sterile to ever feel like home.

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