The Vacation Rental by Katie Sise

Author:Katie Sise [Katie Sise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Domestic, Women, Family Life, General
ISBN: 9781662507748
Google: 2OQX0AEACAAJ
Amazon: B0CCSVXZR4
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2024-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

Georgia. Southport, Connecticut.

Around eleven, Millie’s asleep, and I’m texting back and forth with Maya to keep myself from passing out cold. I need to be awake when Tom comes up. He and Millie watched a movie together, which is not what they normally do back home in Waring Ridge, because Tom can’t sit still long enough to watch an entire movie. He’s usually texting, reading the paper, or catching up on work in his office. Maybe Southport has already put him in vacation mode, or maybe he’s trying to avoid me.

When he finally enters our bedroom, he asks, “You’re still up?” He’s in an old college sweatshirt and looks ten years younger. I would probably love this vacation version of him, if things weren’t so tense between us, and if all of this wasn’t happening with Millie.

“I figured we should talk,” I say, pushing back on the bed so I’m sitting up against the cushioned headboard. He doesn’t move from the doorway. “Come, sit,” I try.

“I need to pee,” he says, and then he heads into the bathroom. The white-marble-tiled floor sparkles beneath the overhead light. He shuts the door, takes an exorbitantly long shower, and when he emerges, he’s back in his sweats and using a fluffy white towel to dry his face. He tosses the towel onto a silky blue armchair, and then he shuts and locks the door to our bedroom. I take this to mean he wants to have sex, which I’m not opposed to, because it seems to be an area of our relationship that works. But when he sits on the edge of the bed, I realize I’ve read him wrong. He doesn’t get under the covers; he just sits there, facing me, staring, his eyes drawn and tired. He might be in vacation mode, but there are still circles beneath his eyes that look darker than they’ve been in a while. My entire hope for this month was that it would help the three of us, but now we seem worse than ever.

“Millie needs her doll,” says Tom. “She keeps mentioning it. And you’ll be thrilled to know she’s now calling it Liza.”

A chill runs through me. “Seriously?”

Tom nods.

“No one ever called Eliza that except my dad,” I say.

Tom shrugs. “And now your daughter has named her doll after your nanny. We can’t seem to get away from everything that happened in that house, even now that we’re finally out of it.”

“Millie’s drawing of Eliza is too weird.”

“It is.” Tom comes a little closer to me on the bed and says, “I don’t think Millie wants to come out and ask us to go get the doll. Maybe she’s embarrassed. She’s a little old for a doll, isn’t she?”

I shake my head. “Maybe. Though I kept that doll around for much longer.”

“I can go get the thing. Can you just text the woman renting our house to leave the doll outside on the steps? Millie says it’s right in her bed.”

“Sure, yeah,” I say, trying to shake off the weirdness of it all.

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