Chapter 13

I drop the letter onto the counter as if it’s on fire, the contents of my stomach roiling with what I’ve just read. It’s the same feeling I get whenever I watch true crime documentaries with Ana—sick and on edge. But this is worse. Whatever secrets Vera had, whoever she was, I refuse to believe she was a murderer. I refuse to believe she was capable of anything so atrocious.

But I have to know. I have to prove them wrong—this letter sender. Prove that they’re trying to scare me, and it won’t work.

“Why would they have mentioned the garden if they were lying?” Cole says when I tell him this theory. “It’ll be easy enough to prove them wrong.”

“Maybe they don’t think we’ll check. Maybe they think we’ll be too scared.”

“Only one way to find out,” Cole says, walking past me with a determined look.

I follow him out of the house. It’s getting dark already, the sunset painting the sky with watercolors in reds, purples, and oranges. It’s eerily quiet out here; the only sound is the swishing of our shoes across the grass.

My throat is dry as we reach the garden, and I stare down. Vera was always so proud of her flower garden. The few times I can remember seeing her smile, it was always here. She’d sit on the concrete bench in the center of the square garden, surrounded by flowers of every color and variety, and just…relax. It was rare for her, someone who always seemed to be busy going and doing, to sit still for any amount of time. But here she did.

The flowers are still bright and flourishing thanks to the gardener who likely worked up until Vera was gone. If there are bodies here, we’re going to have to tear it up. We’re going to have to destroy the place that was always hers.

The one place no one else ever came.

The place she thought was safe.

In the small garden shed, Cole grabs two shovels, passing one to me. “I guess we should just”—he motions with the shovel, pretending to dig—“start anywhere?”

I swallow. Vera’s presence in the house is undeniable, but if I really think about it, this is where I see her the most. Tearing up her garden will be the ultimate betrayal.

Then again, she’s already betrayed me in the worst way possible. With that in mind, I stab the shovel into the ground. The dirt is hard and barely gives way, but I don’t relent. I dig again, unearthing a bush of bright pink flowers.

Taking a cue from me, Cole walks to the opposite corner of the garden and begins to dig. He’s faster than I am, and I swear his dirt must be looser than mine because he seems to clear a sizable space with relative ease, seven bushes of various flowers thrown aside in the time it takes me to remove two.

I pause, swiping the back of my hand across my forehead and huffing a breath.

“You good?”

At first I think he might be teasing me over how slow I’m going, but when I look up, there seems to be genuine concern in his eyes. I’m so confused by this man and who he is now. He’s nothing like the boy I remember.

“I’m fine,” I say, getting back to work.

Cole seems to be digging down deep, while I’m working to uproot the flowers across the surface, my arms burning from exertion.

“You can take a break,” he says, when I’ve paused again.

“Didn’t need your permission,” I snap, out of breath.

He returns to work, then stops suddenly. “You know, sometimes I think you’re nothing like her, but then…there she is.”

My eyes narrow on him, his face painted with shadows. “Excuse me?”

“You claim to be so angry with Vera, you go on and on about the fact that she’s cold and you could never understand her, but how are you any different? How have you ever been any different? You’re her made over.”

Rage grips my organs, forcing my throat to constrict. I grip the wood handle of the shovel. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh”—he chuckles to himself—“I do.”

“I’m nothing like Vera. I have friends. Real friends.” Well, a friend, anyway. “I’m a good person, Cole. Just because I’m not nice to you, because you’ve never been nice to me, doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’m being nice to you now,” he points out. “All I’ve done is be nice to you since we arrived, Bridget. What more do you want from me?”

I open my mouth to argue, to give an example of when he hasn’t been nice since my arrival home, but an example eludes me. Is he right?

“I’ve been nice to you since I came back to Bitter House. Yes, I was a shitty kid who was overcompensating for the fact that my house wasn’t even mine, and you reminded me of that every chance you got, but I’m not that kid anymore. I guess you can’t see that. To you, I’ll always be the kid who teased and ignored you because I was jealous, but?—”

“Jealous?” I cry out, nothing about that statement making sense. “Jealous of what? The fact that my parents were dead? The fact that my grandmother could hardly stand to look at me? That I was alone all the time?”

He swallows, dropping his gaze. “Perception versus reality, I guess.” He meets my eyes again. “Because, from where I stood, I saw the big house, the fact that you got everything you could ever want?—”

“Except love. A family.”

“I had my mom, I won’t apologize for that, but I had nothing else. Don’t you see that? I’d lived in Bitter House since I was six years old. It was the only home I’d ever known, and yet I didn’t have a room I could make my own. I didn’t get to make requests for dinner or have birthday parties with all my friends. I walked on eggshells my entire life here. Add to that the fact that I didn’t have the money to do half of what you did. I didn’t have a car when I turned sixteen or a new phone when my screen cracked, like yours did all the time. And yeah, maybe looking back, those are pretty crappy things to complain about in the grand scheme of things, but when you were constantly being handed everything you could want and all of my things were shoved into the one room I was allowed to exist in inside this house I didn’t belong in, it wasn’t exactly the time of my life.”

“So why fight to stay here, then?” I demand. “Why not just walk away?”

“Because it is mine now. It’s proof that…” He stops, pressing his lips together with a huff, and looks away. “It’s proof that Vera actually wanted me here. That I misread all of this. That she gave me the house over her own family because…maybe she thought of me as family, too. Maybe she…maybe she didn’t hate me after all.”

I stare at him, listening to his words, the truth of them in his voice, and I realize I’ve had him wrong all this time. We were just two kids living in this tomb of a house, feeling unwanted and out of place.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally, my voice powerless. “I never thought of it like that.”

He nods, returning to work.

“For the record, I don’t think Vera was capable of hate. She didn’t hate you. Mostly because she also couldn’t love anyone, not since she lost her husband. There was something wrong with her. She was empty, I think. It wasn’t us, it was her.”

He doesn’t look at me, but I can tell he’s processing my words as his movements slow. “Well, like I said before, losing someone you love can do that to a person. It makes me sad for her more than anything.”

I don’t know what to say to that or how to feel, so I return to digging, but I quickly realize I have more to add.

“Also, for the record, I don’t know how to get close to people anymore. The issue is still with me. Sometimes I don’t even see that I’m being rude. I’m just…protecting myself. Vera really hurt me. And your mom, too. And you. The day I was sent away, it felt like my already small world just collapsed, and I’m scared to let anyone in, so I’m…” I smile to myself. “My friend calls me a cactus. I’m prickly, but it’s just because I’ve been hurt by everyone I’ve ever trusted, you included. It’s self-preservation at its finest.”

He cocks his head to the side. “I was a kid, B.”

“You were twenty.”

“It wasn’t my house. Or my mom’s for that matter. It devastated her to make you leave, but she had a job to do. It was never because she didn’t care about you. Or that I didn’t either, for that matter. Because I did. I do. As much as I teased you, as much as I picked on you, you were always family. You have to know that.”

“Family?” I ask softly. “Is that why you punched Cory Steele in school after he made fun of me?”

He jerks his head backward with surprise. “You knew about that?”

“The whole school knew about that,” I say with a scoff.

“You never asked me about it back then.”

I shrug. “I’m asking now.”

“Cory was an asshole.” His response is clipped.

“Was it over me?” I push again.

He sighs. “Look, a lot of people talked shit about you back then, but not around me. Cory knew that, and he chose to do it anyway. There were consequences.”

A strange sort of warmth blooms in my chest. “You were the only one allowed to pick on me, hmm?”

He meets my eyes briefly with one corner of his mouth upturned. “Something like that.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” He waves me off. “But we should really get back to work before it gets too dark to see anything.”

We’re already almost at that point, so he’s right. We work in silence for another hour, finding nothing. The entire garden has been destroyed, including the earth around Vera’s bench, though it’s cemented into the ground and can’t be moved.

“There’s nothing,” Cole says, out of breath. His entire T-shirt is soaked through with dark patches of sweat. He stabs his shovel into the ground, leaving it standing on its own. “Nothing here. This was a waste of time.”

I stare around at the mess we’ve made. “Maybe we have to dig deeper.”

“How much deeper can we go?” He looks around from the hole where he’s standing, the dirt reaching just level with the top of his head. “I’m nearly six foot tall. You really think Vera could’ve dug a hole like this by herself?”

I smile to myself. “If Vera had enough time, I’m not sure there’s anything she couldn’t have done.”

“Fair enough.” He tries to pull himself up out of the dirt, clawing at the ground to find a place to get hold, and when I stick out my hand to help him up, he hesitates before taking hold of it, the two of us dragging him out of the hole and to his feet. Once he’s standing, I realize he hasn’t released my hand. We’re so close I can smell the scent of him—an intense mixture of sweat and earth and cologne. We look down at the place where we’re connected, his hand in mine, and all at once, we drop hands and take a step back.

He rubs a hand over the back of his neck, smearing mud wherever he touches. “We can dig some more tomorrow, if you’d like, but it’s getting dark. We should…we should get inside and clean up.”

I nod. As much as I want to argue, to insist we stay and keep digging until we find something, I know he’s right. It’s too dark to properly see anything at this point.

We put our shovels away for now and make our way into the house. There is dirt under my fingernails and in my hair, and once I’m in the shower, I watch the mud painting the water brown as it washes down the drain.

I feel strangely empty, though I don’t know why. Not finding anything in the garden should be a good thing. It’s not like I wanted to prove that Vera was a murderer. But it leaves me with more questions than answers. Who is writing the letters? Why did they lie? What do they want from us?

Though I know we can go out and dig more tomorrow, I think Cole is probably right. We made quite a dent in the garden and the earth beneath it, and there was nothing suspicious at all.

Which makes it clear that whoever is writing the letters thought we wouldn’t check. Maybe they thought we’d take their word for it. Or maybe they thought their warning not to leave would play some sort of reverse psychology trick on us, and we’d head for the hills without looking back.

I suspect the letter writer could be Zach or Jenn—or maybe the two of them working together—but I’m more determined than ever to find out for sure. When I get out of the shower, I log in to my banking app and check my balance. There’s not much in there now that my half of the rent has come out, but there’s enough. I open my browser and search for a security camera with decent reviews that will get here by tomorrow. When I find one, I add it to my cart and, without allowing myself to second-guess the unplanned expenditure, I place the order.

Vera was always old-fashioned about security. She believed the gate was enough, but I need to know who’s leaving the letters, and as soon as the camera arrives, I’ll be able to do just that.

Downstairs, I find Cole in the sitting room with a glass of some amber-colored liquid on the rocks.

He looks up, clearly surprised to see me. “I thought you’d gone to bed.”

“Not yet.” Though my body is tired and sore enough I know the second I hit the mattress, I’m done for. “Thought I’d come down for a drink instead.”

He stands up. “Can I make you something?”

“Vodka soda’s perfect,” I tell him. “Extra?—”

“Extra lime,” he says at the same time, nodding. “I remember your preference for all things sour.”

I sink down onto the couch on the opposite end of where he’d been sitting, curling a leg up under me. My hair is still wet, slight waves forming around my face, and I tuck both sides behind my ears as he makes his way across the room from the copper bar cart to hand me my glass.

I take a sip, the burn of the drink already soothing me somewhere deep in my core. “You know, I used to be so jealous of Vera and Edna when I’d find them in this room at night. They were always so…otherworldly, I guess. They’d be having important adult conversations, always in hushed voices, drinks in their hands. I remember thinking, ‘I want to be just like them someday.’ Important, you know? Powerful. Back then, I thought Vera was the epitome of power.”

He takes a sip of his own drink, nodding before crunching on a piece of ice. “They always seemed to have it all together. That’s what I remember. I don’t know if I ever saw Vera lose her cool or even seem stressed. She was just…stone.”

“That’s a good way to describe her, actually. Stone. Unbreakable.” My voice cracks, and I feel betraying tears fill my eyes.

He looks at me but doesn’t ask what’s wrong. I don’t think he needs to. Instead, he just stares, waiting for me to speak.

“I just can’t believe she’s actually gone, can you? I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m crying. I hadn’t spoken to her in over a decade, but I guess I always thought a day would come where we’d fix it, you know? That she’d tell me what I did wrong, and I could make it right somehow. And now…” I sniffle, drying my eyes, then force a laugh. “Wow, I’m so sorry. I’m exhausted, can you tell?”

He doesn’t laugh, just stares at me with those pitying eyes that I love to hate. “You lost your grandmother, Bridget. It’s normal to be sad, no matter how complicated the relationship was. But, for what it’s worth, I hope you know you aren’t to blame. There was nothing you needed to fix. No matter what, there is nothing you could’ve done that would justify Vera making you leave. That’s not how family is supposed to work.”

I stare at him for a long time. There’s something in the timbre of his voice that makes me think he’s speaking from experience. “Do you…I mean, are your grandparents still alive? I’ve never heard you talk about them.”

“No,” he says, taking another sip of his drink. “Not the ones that matter, anyway. I never knew my dad’s parents, and Edna’s dad died before I was born. Her mom, the grandma I knew, passed away when I was twelve.”

Right around the time I moved in. He was going through so much, and I never saw it. “I’m sorry.”

He runs his teeth over his bottom lip. “Happens to the best of us.”

“How different do you think life would’ve been if we’d gotten along back then?”

He looks over at me. “Us?” His hand waves back and forth between our chests.

“Yeah. I mean, you were two years older than me. We could’ve been more like siblings.”

“I think, in general, siblings fight too,” he says simply.

“But they also love each other.”

“I fought someone for you. You wouldn’t call that love?”

His words shock me. “What?”

He swirls his drink, downing the last of it and moving to the bar cart to refill it. “Maybe in our own strange way, we showed love how we could. Just like you were jealous of Catherine Marshall.” When he looks back at me, the grin on his face is positively devilish. “Although, if we’d been siblings, I’m pretty sure that sort of jealousy would’ve been illegal or, at the very least, frowned upon.”

My face burns, ears ringing. “I was not jealous of Catherine. She was just…awful.” I think of the many days I passed Catherine and Cole walking out of his bedroom, her hair mussed, lips red. I picture the way she’d sneer at me, how she told everyone at school that I was basically my grandmother’s servant, though it was the furthest thing from the truth. Vera was far too busy ignoring me to ever ask me to do anything.

“If you say so,” he teases, sitting down on the couch again and leaning backward, one foot on the marble coffee table.

“I’m serious. I didn’t like her being here.”

“Or any of the other girls I brought home.” One of his dark brown brows quirks, and I have the sudden urge to lunge forward and press it right back down.

“She was cruel. She started rumors about me. Teased me.”

His eyes narrow, jaw dropping, and I can practically see the gears turning as he processes what I’ve told him. “Wait. Are you serious?”

I press my lips together, giving him a look that says I’m not in the mood to play. “Come on, you knew she did.”

“I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I never would’ve…” He looks down. “I punched Cory over talking shit about you. Do you really think I would’ve brought her here—that I would’ve been dating her at all—if I’d known she was doing the same?”

The seriousness in his voice startles me. Could he really not have known that was happening back then? “Whatever. It doesn’t matter anymore. It was a long time ago. I just thought you were obnoxious with all the girls you brought home. Security was important to Vera. We didn’t need to have strangers in the house.”

“Oh, come on. Vera told me herself that it was fine for me to have people over, otherwise I would’ve never done it. Mom wouldn’t have let me and you know it.” He leans back farther with a cocky grin that makes my blood boil. “Besides, they weren’t strangers. I’d say I knew them pretty well.”

“Yeah, well, you knew most of the girls at our school pretty well.”

He grins at me. “Sure, but not the cactus across the hall.”

“I never should have told you that.” I cover my eyes with one hand.

“Too late now.”

Looking back up at him, I narrow my gaze. “I wasn’t jealous. I just happened to think you chose your girlfriends horribly.”

He turns on the couch until he’s facing me, one leg tucked up under him, mirroring my position. If either of us move an inch forward, our knees will be touching.

“Okay, one, most of them weren’t my girlfriends. And two, who would you rather me date? Someone like you?”

“Would that have been so bad? Someone who actually cared about you? Who cared about something other than sleeping with you, I mean? You were cycling through girls back then so fast, and no one cared. Would someone like me have really been so boring?”

He snorts, but there’s nothing cruel in his eyes or tone. We’re having fun now. “Someone so prim and proper she probably hadn’t been kissed yet? We both know you wouldn’t have known how to handle me at that age. But, for the record, I wasn’t using those girls back then, and they weren’t using me. We both got what we wanted, simple as that.”

“Meaningless sex.”

“Among other things.”

“Like?”

“Distraction. Attention. Probably the same reason you were dating whatever guy you were dating around that time.”

“I wasn’t dating anyone. Like you just said, I was a prim and proper girl who’d never been kissed, remember?”

Something dark flashes in his eyes. “When did that change?”

“When did I stop being prim and proper?” I laugh.

“When did you have your first kiss?”

My cheeks are suddenly an inferno as shock sweeps through me. I hum, staring up at the ceiling to hide it. “Sam Kellerman. I was”—I think back—“seventeen. He kissed me at prom.”

His face is stoic as he nods and takes another drink. “And? How was it?”

“Uneventful,” I admit. “Though not at the time.”

He chuckles.

“And you? When did you have your first kiss? The ripe old age of ten?”

There’s that lopsided grin again. “Twelve. And then sex at fourteen.”

My heart picks up speed. “That’s so young.”

He shrugs. “Probably, but it didn’t feel like it at the time. I’m not, like, traumatized over it or anything. It was with a girl I liked well enough. Didn’t work out, which was fine, and then, once I got the hang of things, I figured I may as well have fun.”

None of what he’s saying truly surprises me. Cole was twelve when we met, and I watched all throughout his teenage years while he dated and hooked up with several girls, many of whom I didn’t know since he’d met them through his job or friends, and they went to different schools, but none of whom ever seemed very nice.

“Are you still that way?” I ask, posing the question I’m dying to have an answer to as simple curiosity. “Wild and free? Or have you settled down some?”

His smile is soft, distant. Clearly, he’s thinking hard about something. “I’m not the kid I was, no. I’ve grown up, but I’m no saint if that’s what you mean. I like to think I choose women that I’m a better match for now.”

“Well, you must be pretty different, since you haven’t had a single girl over, and it’s been all of, what, three days? The old you would’ve been going stir crazy.”

He sucks his drink down. “You’re awfully interested in my sex life, B.”

“Just trying to decide if—I mean, if this thing is going to be long term—we should come up with some sort of system. Like a sock on the door sort of thing. I’d hate to walk in on something I may never recover from.”

“Same here.” He eyes me. “Do I need to worry about that?”

“Do I?”

His lips twist together, his gaze positively searing. “How about I let you know?”

“Same.”

He nods, then stands, rubbing his hand over his thigh. “I should get to bed. I’ll see you in the morning, Cactus.”

Once I realize what he’s said, I turn to tell him to stop calling me that, but he’s already gone. I feel his absence in every part of my body.

What the hell is happening here, and why do I not want it to stop?