The Last House Guest (ARC) by Megan Miranda

Author:Megan Miranda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon
Published: 2019-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

SUMMER

2018

CHAPTER 16

In the end, I backed out of the driveway of One Landing Lane with nothing more that I’d arrived with seven years earlier: a laptop on the seat beside me; the box of the lost and my luggage tossed into the backseat; the remaining items from the kitchen, bathroom, and desk hastily thrown into a few plastic garbage bags that fit on the floorboard. I didn’t even have to open my trunk.

SADIE’S SERVICE THE YEAR earlier had been in Connecticut, an unseasonably warm day with a traitorous bright blue sky.

I’d picked my outfit because it had been hers first, because I could feel her beside me as I slipped my arms into the short bell sleeves of the dress, could imagine the dark gray fabric brushing against her legs. I thought it would help me blend in. But I felt too large in her clothes, the zipper cinching at my waist, the hemline more festive on me than serious, as it had been on her. I felt the sideways glance from the couple beside me, and the fabric prickled my skin.

I heard once that you can’t dream a face until you’ve seen it in real life. That the figures in dreams are either real people, or blurry and unformed, things you can’t recall when you wake.

But that day it felt like I must’ve dreamed up the whole town. Row after row of flat, stiff expressions. Everywhere I looked, a sense of déjà vu. Names on the tip of my tongue. Faces I must’ve conjured from Sadie’s stories of home.

When everyone reconvened to the Lomans’ stately brick-front home after the service, there was an odd familiarity to it, like something I almost knew. Maybe it was the way Bianca had decorated, a similar footprint to the homes. Or a familiar scent. The background of photos throughout the years that had pieced together subconsciously in my mind. So that I could open a door and know what would be there in the second before it was revealed. On my right, the coat closet. The third door on the left down the hall would be the bathroom, and it would be a shade of almost blue.

I believe that a person can become possessed by someone else—at least in part. That one life can slip inside another, giving it shape. In this way, I could judge Sadie’s reaction before it occurred, picture an expression in the second before she shared it. It was how I could anticipate what she would do before she did it, because I believed I understood how she thought, and the push and pull that would lead her to any given moment—except her final ones.

As I moved through the house, the only person I believed could see that possession in me was Luce, standing beside Parker on the other side of the living room, glass in hand, watching me closely. Ever since Parker had introduced us when they pulled up in the drive that summer, she’d been watching me.

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