Epilogue Emily

NO.

They do not get a happy ending.

I returned to the lake house, to the leveled charred remains, because I had to, to leave a tribute, my finished tarot cards. One in the cellar, the only real remaining room. One in the garden, a fertile ground for bones. One in the place I imagine the attic fell. And one where my beloved Chase lay for a while.

They say it was a mistake, that maybe if I didn't keep returning, I wouldn't have looked so guilty. But I had to. I still have to. I'm not done.

So I rebuilt the lake house in my mind, log by log and wire by wire. I painstakingly painted the walls, matching shades of color to my memory, carving fairy tales into Princess Kennedy's walls. I snaked plumbing through the innards of the house, flushing the scent of sawdust through the attic and mold in the cellar, tinged with rot, infusing the garden with dew. I resurrected the souls of my brother and his killers and filled their minds with fractured memories, and wound them like dolls to relive the night I killed them over and over again.

My little dollhouse by the lake. Not bad for a plain Jane who lacks the sight.

Revenge doesn't come to you in a moment.

It has to be repeated again and again and again until it sticks.

I haven't perfected it yet.

Because they're all still here in my head.

The dead don't sleep, and neither do I.

My mother's last words to me, after the trial and before the sentencing, were this: Do you feel any shred of remorse for what you've done?

Mine to her: They never did.

They never did.

She took a hard look at me, and I knew what she was thinking. You will.

But it's true. They never did.

It's just as simple as that. They killed Ryan, they felt no remorse, and no one held them to account. They never faced a trial, never had their story picked apart with all the world watching.

Of course it wouldn't be the same for me. I will serve four consecutive sentences for second-degree murder. But there you have it.

I am held to account every day. Every time I close my eyes. My visions are no longer in my control. My friends no longer burn. They walk through fire like rays of sunlight. They play board games while billows of smoke swirl around them. Time seems to move backward.

The house lives on, and I'm the only one who knows. My wicked, unforgivable friends, buried but not gone, dead and awake. In my mind, in dreams and daylight, I am forced to watch them in that house I burned. Ryan hovering at the edge of the lake. Me a world away, and still so close I can smell the charred wood. I've spent so long reliving my revenge that I cannot escape it. The house is lodged inside me now. I don't think I could ever pry it out. No matter how many times I burn it to the ground, it rebuilds itself, and they return. Like it never happened, and I am not done.

I wish my mother would come back so I could ask her if this is how it feels to see.

Or if it's just the ghost of a dozen odd summers haunting me, twisting things up. Making me see things and feel things I shouldn't.

Because the more the house visits me, the stronger my need to return to it grows. It calls me to it night after night in a voice as soft as ash, whispering an invitation. I long to return to its empty rooms, its echoing walls, to my phantom friends. I wish I could make them listen, make them understand what they did to me, why I had to do what I did to them. Maybe then I would be allowed to come back. I know that there is a price for what I've done. The house decides its own fate, and the fate of all whose lives it touches. And as long as I live and forever after, when my body is dust and dirt, it will hold me as it does now, powerless to stay, powerless to leave. I can never return to the lake house, but it will not let me go. It will never, ever let me go.