Chapter 49

I reach Kennedy's room andthrow the balcony doors open, but as I'm about to slide my leg over the railing, I hear a familiar, horrible, crushing sound.

Hands knocking.

Emily screaming.

From the attic.

Chase was right.

It's happening again.

Exactly the same way.

I turn and face the monster. The crushing heat, the smoke, the fire creeping closer and closer, Emily's panicked voice above me, the pounding in the attic. Not this time. I'm not leaving her this time. I position myself behind the bed and force it across the room, agonizingly slowly, throwing all of my weight, my heart, my terror, behind it. In a nightmare, you get second chances. This doesn't feel like a nightmare. It feels unbearably real. But I can't live with the guilt of killing her twice.

I step up on the bed and stand on tiptoe, and my fingers just graze the latch of the attic door. It's scorching hot.

"I'm here!" I shout up to her.

She doesn't answer, and the thumps are growing fainter and further apart. I steel myself and go for the latch again, and this time it comes open. I yank the door down, and a wave of shock runs through me. It's not her. It's not Emily. Kennedy is crouched at the top of the ladder, her face pressed low, taking short, shallow breaths. She reaches for me, and I pull her down into my arms. We land on the bed in a swirl of smoke, and she coughs and drops onto the floor.

I try to pull her up, toward the balcony, but she stops me, grabbing my arm.

"Chelsea, wait." She looks into my eyes, dread radiating out of them. "Ryan is dead."

I stare at her, my mind spinning like a music box. But then I see it. The shadowy figure comes into view. The panicked swim to the boat, the alibi, the doomed walk back to the lake house, Emily's silhouette in the attic. The Summer of Swallows. "When did you remember?"

"The boat brought some of it back. When I first woke on the deck, I thought it was a dream. You were so sure you saw someone fall, but it didn't make sense. Ryan left. How could he have… But then when I was alone on the water, it came back. He followed me. I lived it, like a waking nightmare. I knew what we did."

I try to comprehend. "Mila figured it out when she went back out on the water too. Chase saw it in the clearing in the tarot card. That's what you were hiding from me. Not who set the fire. Mila tried to tell me, but Chase wouldn't let her."

"The guilt almost destroyed you, Chelsea. Of course he was afraid to tell you."

"Ryan never came back." I crawl over to her and we huddle together.

"We saw what we wanted to believe." Kennedy coughs violently. "I didn't mean to kill him, Chelsea." She coughs again and buries her head in my shoulder. "We've been lying so long, some parts begin to feel like the truth. But I didn't mean to do it. I didn't."

I take her hand, cold and smooth, and press it to my lips. "I know, Kennedy." I feel my insides turning from numbness to nausea. The smoke is killing my lungs. "But we have to get out of here." I start to climb to my feet.

"Wait," she says again, and pulls me away from the balcony. "When I was a little girl, I used to see ghosts. Especially in this house."

"But you don't believe," I whisper.

She sits, steadying herself on the bed. "I learned long ago to keep it a secret. It scares people. They sent me away once and I never said another word. But this house is special. The ghosts. There was one in the lake that was always angry. The dripping man. But the others looked after me like family. Like one of their own." Her eyes drift up to the attic, and a sense of dread fills me.

"The tea party," I whisper.

She nods. "They've always been here. It's like time doesn't work the same in their world. They're living every day at once. Reliving. Every moment of my life that I spent at this house, they were there. They don't leave. They don't change. To me they looked grotesque—like corpses. But to each other, they look exactly like they did the day they died."

I look to the balcony anxiously. The fire is burning through the house, devouring the walls, creeping closer. "Kennedy, we have to go."

"One minute," she begs. "There are five ghosts in the lake house. The dripping man, the blue lady, the backward girl, the woman on the stairs, and the crushed man."

I pull her to her feet. "I want to hear this. I do. But we need to get out before the floor collapses." My bigger fear, though, is that the smoke is making her delirious. Smoke kills more people than fire does.

She pulls back wearily and sinks back onto the bed. "I can't."

There's a loud boom from somewhere within the house, and I begin to panic. "Six feet. I'll carry you. You don't even have to get up."

Kennedy coughs and braces herself against the bed to steady herself. "I wouldn't make it to the ground."

I get on my hands and knees and begin to pull her toward the balcony, but she's dead weight and, struggling with every ounce of strength in my body, I still can't make her move. "The smoke is messing with your head. You don't remember how fast this place went up before."

"Chelsea," she says in the softest voice imaginable. "You don't remember."

Her hand breaks out of mine, and I crash through the balcony doors. I catch myself on the railing and press my face against the bars to get a breath of untainted air. For one sweet moment I close my eyes and feel a cool lake breeze sweep over my face, breathing life, hope, faith into me. Then I open my eyes and they travel down toward the ground.

It's the strangest thing.

A body lies there, lifeless, drained. I know she's dead with just a glance. The angles of her bones are sharp and unforgiving. It wasn't necessarily a deadly drop from the balcony, but it was a harsh fall, an unlucky fall. She just didn't make it. Her neck is twisted in such a way that although her chest is pressed into the grass, her face is wrenched around over her shoulder. Backward. She gazes up, her eyes wide open, fixed at the sky, clear and questioning. Not peaceful. You couldn't say peaceful or at rest. She looks searching, hopeful, afraid, but determined.

I died determined.

No.

No.

"You have to understand why we can't leave," Kennedy says quietly.

"But we did leave. I was at the hospital—"

"After Ryan died," she says firmly. "For weeks, not a year. Remember—"

"No." I back away, from the balcony, from Kennedy. I don't remember. I don't want to remember.

But she advances toward me, and I push it away, the memory of the hospital, the note, last summer. The fire and the fall. Emily. The stories we told ourselves, dreams in the in-between, blurred into the buried horror of that dark night.

"We saw what we wanted to believe," Kennedy echoes herself. "We saw ourselves survive."

"But Emily was the one in the attic."

Kennedy nods. "She was, the night Ryan died. But not the night of the fire."

I run to the attic ladder and climb it, and when I reach the top, the whole world falls away. I stare at the figure lying airless, drowning in smoke, her skin tinged with sky. Kennedy. Lifeless, lost, alone. Gone. I climb back down numbly. "You were the blue lady."

"You're the backward girl." She smiles, her eyes glistening. "Ryan was the dripping man, Mila was the woman on the stairs. Chase… was crushed. I finally understand."

Fear grips me, and I grasp the ladder for balance. "Is this hell? We killed someone, then woke to our worst nightmares."

"I don't think so. We've been working through parts of our lives that puzzled or frightened us. Like in dreams. I think those places we thought we went last year were like a smokescreen because none of us were ready to face the truth. That's what we've been doing tonight, isn't it? The invitation, the game, the boat—all of that came from within. We all betrayed someone in the room. We all kissed a killer. And we all killed a best friend."

It is true. There was always something worse than each of the places we imagined we were last year, something harder to face.

What we did.

We killed a friend and covered it up. And we've been lying to ourselves and everyone else since the day his body was swallowed up by the lake.

"We never left this house, Chelsea." She holds on to me tightly.

The realization creeps over me slowly, like goose bumps. "It was never rebuilt. We're just stuck in time." There's another explosion, and flames begin to move inside the room. "We have to go."

"Why? I've seen us here since I was a baby," she says. "You, me, Mila, and Chase. We go on. I don't know whether it's a punishment or a gift or a scientific anomaly. But we do go on. We get to watch us grow and fight and fall in love and die, again and again and again. We've always been here."

It isn't possible. We did those things. That's our past. The future is nothing. But Kennedy looks so sure. "It's not a gift. We stole a person's life. We kept the truth from his parents."

"And Emily stole ours. We'll have to carry both of those things with us forever. No more lies." She sounds relieved, and for the first time since I can remember, she looks like herself again. Her shoulders relax. A calm settles over her. She takes my hand, and I feel warmth, a new warmth I don't know how to understand. "This is where we belong," she says. "Where all our best memories are. Every day is summer here. This is our house." Her hair is brilliant in the glow of the blaze, her eyes feverish, her cheeks flushed. She looks like a goddess.

I want to run away and I want to stay. There is love here and pain here. "I can't do it. It hurts."

"We remember pain," she says. "Maybe someday we won't."

But we will, at times. At the tea party, it will hurt to see my young self for the first time and to know the price of coming to the lake house. In the Summer of Thrashers it will hurt to see Emily walk through the door. It will hurt to let that raccoon kill our beloved pet. It will always hurt to see our younger selves grow angry and estranged, because that is what led to our downfall, our death. But what happened happened and we can't change the past.

"We made it through the fire," she says. "We survived death itself. What do we have to be afraid of anymore?"

I take a deep breath, and the memory of smoke evaporates inside the memory of my body. It's beginning to fade already. "This was the last puzzle. The biggest fear. We faced the truth and broke the spell. What we did to Ryan. What Emily did to us. We could be done with all of it, Kennedy. Leave the lake house."

"And what? Disappear? Cease to exist?"

"Or something better."

"But not together."

"You don't know that."

"I know I choose forever in a burning house if it means I'll wake up and see your face every day. I don't want something better. I don't know that there is something better, and neither do you." Flames surround us, but the heat has dulled to a gentle warmth. Kennedy's hands close around my face, and I remember heat. I remember salt and fear and sadness and longing. "Chelsea. Stay." She kisses me and I remember stars and fireworks, laughter. I kiss her back and remember rain, hope, beauty.

We remain until the world is gone.

We cannot go forward, or backward, or remain, alone. We have played dolls and demons, fire and first love, blood and betrayal. We have kissed and killed and broken hearts and bones and promises and trust. But we have done these things together, always. We always come back. We are the invitation. We came to the lake house, to live and to love and to die. To the Hartford Cabin, our grave and our home. We come one last time, every time, before we all go. June 17, the day we die, every day, forever. We will always come to the lake house. We will no longer burn. Time will move backward, sputter, spin on its axis. The house will rise and fall and rise again, and still we will remain. It lives on, and so do we. No one can make us leave.

How could they?

We are the lake house.