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Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

2018

Thursday

"I hate when it gets so dark so early," the woman in the seat behind her said. "Don't you hate this time of year? I mean, it's not even six thirty! And it's only…what, October eleventh? The clocks won't even change until next month!"

The woman's seatmate mumbled something in reply, but Mia didn't bother to catch the words. Instead, she put her elbow on the metal armrest and peered out her window, the noisy clatter of the rails changing to a gentle metallic purr as her train emerged into the outside air from the depths of Manhattan. The woman was right—the city landscape looked dramatically different from even fifteen minutes ago, when the lowering sun still lit the sky as she'd entered Penn Station.

But unlike the woman behind her, she didn't mind. Each year, she waited with growing impatience for fall to come and the days to grow shorter. She loved how streetlamps and traffic signals, headlamps on cars and flashlights on phones, became weak substitutes for daylight. They aimed to make the night appear tame and restrained, like a tiger tucked behind a glass enclosure at the zoo. But their power was an illusion. Nobody controlled the night. The best you could do was make it your friend.

Mia tucked her collarbone-length brown hair behind her ears and pressed her forehead against the window, cupping the sides of her eyes with her hands to block the glare from the train's overhead fixture. That was one of the lessons her grandmother had taught her when she was little—that the night could be a fine friend, but only if you understood all it offered. Growing up, she'd had many friends who were scared of the dark. Their parents were, too, it seemed. Many families in town kept their porch lights on all night; and when she'd go on sleepovers, she was amazed at the plethora of nightlights—in bathrooms, in hallways, even in the bedrooms where she and her friends slept. But her grandmother had always craved the dark. She'd claimed that lamps, chandeliers, and so on were unpleasant and unhelpful, with their harsh bulbs and the distracting shadows they threw.

The night sky is bright if you look closely , she'd say. It tells you exactly where you need to go .

Mia's phone rang, disturbing her memories, and she bit her lip as she looked at her bag on the seat next to her. She hoped it was her friend Erica confirming that she'd be at the station near the ticket machines at seven thirty, waiting to pick her up so they could head to dinner. But when she pulled out her phone, the number was Ryan's. She hesitated before putting the phone to her ear.

"Hey," she said, trying to sound pleased. "Where are you, at the airport?"

"About to board," he told her. "And you?"

"On the train."

"Will you go straight to the house?"

"No, Erica's picking me up. We're going to get dinner. Then she'll drop me off."

There was a pause, and then Ryan continued, "You sure you want to do this?"

Mia pressed her lips together, stifling her sigh so he wouldn't hear it. "I have to," she said. "I can't let the house keep sitting there."

"But I'll be back soon. Two weeks won't make a difference. I can be there with you. That's what boyfriends are for, you know." He chuckled and then went on, more serious now. "You don't have to do this alone. You don't need to prove anything?—"

"I'm not trying to prove anything," she told him. They'd been over this a lot. Ryan liked being needed, and it bothered him that she didn't want him to come with her when she returned to the house for the first time since her grandmother died.

"I want to spend the night there by myself," she added. "Then tomorrow I'll meet up with Erica again, and Saturday we leave for the Adirondacks."

She waited, sure he was going to protest further. But thankfully, a voice in the background announced the last boarding call for Flight 1642 to Los Angeles.

"Is that yours?" she asked.

"Yeah," he answered, resignation in his voice. "Okay, but look, make sure to get the exact measurements for the two upstairs bedrooms and the hall. I can't make out the handwriting on the old floor plans you picked up from town hall, and I want to be able to talk intelligently with the architect if we decide to break down that wall. And make sure the gardener cleared the leaves. You want the place to look nice, no matter what you decide to do with it. And set a timer on the hall light, for God's sake?—"

"There's no need?—"

"Mia, this is my business. I work in real estate, remember? I hear these stories all the time—a property looks vacated and it's as if the owner sent a personal invitation to any burglar in a twenty-five-mile radius?—"

"Okay, I've got it all covered. Go ahead, don't miss your flight."

"And call if you get scared or creeped out. Call anytime , okay?"

"I won't feel creeped out. I grew up there."

"And that's exactly why you might feel weird, Mia…"

There was a rustling as his voice trailed off, and she pictured him getting up from the plastic airport chair, throwing his coat over his arm, and starting to wheel his carry-on toward the gate.

"I gotta go," he said into the phone. "I love you. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay," she said. "Have a good flight."

She waited for him to end the call, then studied the screen for a moment before returning her phone to her bag. It always surprised her, how effortlessly he tagged the words "I love you" onto the end of their conversations. He'd started doing it a few months ago, and she still didn't know if he meant it or it automatically came out without his thinking about it, simply because they'd been dating for almost a year now. She wondered if he'd noticed that she never responded with "I love you, too." But she didn't feel it, not yet anyway, and she wasn't the kind of person who said things without meaning them.

Still, she understood his frustration about tonight. She could have arranged this trip for a time when he could have joined her. But she'd scheduled it for today specifically because she knew he was flying out on a business trip. She hoped he bought her story, that she merely wanted to be alone. She didn't relish keeping secrets from him. But she couldn't bring him to the empty house.

Because there was something there he couldn't see. Something that she had to find and deal with before she could ever let him in.

She settled in for the seventy-minute ride and when the train slowed as it approached the Soundport train station, she pulled on her tan fall jacket and slung her bag over her shoulder. Standing, she gave a quick smile to the woman upset about the dark, then pulled her suitcase from the overhead rack and made her way to the exit doors. They slid open, and she stepped onto the station platform, feeling an almost imperceptible autumn coolness in the breeze that swept around the hem of her straight-leg pants and touched the skin above her brown ankle boots—a foreshadowing of the cold weather not too far in the future. The air held a familiar, faint scent of wood-burning fires, sweet and earthy, no doubt coming from the chimneys of nearby houses, and the leaves on the tall oak trees on either side of the station house glowed orange, reflecting the light from the half-moon and the sprinkling of stars above. These were the smells and sights and feels of home, and although she wasn't the crying type, she couldn't stop her breathing from becoming a little jagged. It was her first autumn here without her grandmother.

"Mia!" a voice called, and she looked down the short flight of concrete steps to see Erica waving out the window of her idling Civic. She took a deep, cleansing inhale, and went down to the car.

Tossing her suitcase into the back, she climbed into the passenger seat and gave her friend a hug. "I am so glad we're doing this," she said. "It's going to be great to get away."

"I know," Erica said. "A whole week of hiking. Are you hungry? I'm starved. Let's head straight to Caryn's."

They drove the short distance to Main Street, which ran through the center of the small town and was lined with bars, restaurants, and an array of food markets, home goods shops, and pretty clothing boutiques. Erica pulled into a parking spot in front of a single-story building with a bright-blue sign in the window that read "Caryn's Fine Eats." Mia loved that Erica knew Caryn's was exactly where she'd want to go. They'd been coming here since they were old enough to drive, hanging out with friends when they were in high school, meeting up during college breaks when they were both home, and more recently stopping in for a drink or a bite whenever Mia was in town visiting her grandmother.

They ordered their usual—cheeseburgers, sweet potato fries, extra sweet pickles, and some local beers that were impossible to find anywhere else. Erica slid her menu back into the rack and leaned forward on the table. "So. How are you doing?"

Mia took a sip of the beer the server placed before her. "I'm okay. Tonight's going to be hard. But she'd want me to be okay in the house without her."

Erica ran her fingers through her wavy, champagne-colored hair. "I can't believe Lucy's gone," she murmured. "I saw her in town all the time, right up until the end. She had so much energy, and you couldn't miss her, with that gray sweatshirt and short white hair, and that no-nonsense walk of hers. And the way she looked at people when they were talking—you know, with her eyes narrowed and intense, and her lips pursed so tightly. Like there were a million problems in the world and she wanted to make sure she didn't miss anything, because she needed to solve them one by one."

Mia nodded, picturing that very expression, the way Lucy's amber eyes would become narrow, her eyebrows would draw close, and her thin lips would press together when she was listening intently. Even when she was young, Mia always strived to be serious and insightful when she and Lucy were talking. Because there was little as wonderful as saying something that was worthy of her grandmother's complete attention.

Erica tilted her head. "You know, you have that expression too sometimes," she said gently.

"Me? Really?"

"For sure. I mean, mostly you don't look like her at all. The whole shape of your face is different—hers long and yours rounder. But your eyes are exactly the same, that clear goldish-brown. And when you're focusing in on something and you purse your lips—like just now when you were reading the list of beers to see what they'd added to the menu—I swear it was like I could see her in you."

Mia pressed her chin back in surprise. "No kidding? I guess I picked that up from her. Although it probably doesn't have the same impact as when she did it. She was so strong, right? It drove people crazy sometimes. Ryan could never get used to her. But I always thought she was easy to love, in a funny way. Don't you think?"

"Absolutely. And she loved you so much, Mia. I don't mind telling you that with three sisters, I was always kind of jealous of that. When I would run into her in town, you were all she wanted to talk about. She was so proud when you started your job at the hospital and moved into Manhattan. One of the premier research institutions in the world, she loved to say. And she couldn't wait for you to go back to school to earn your PhD so you could run your own lab. Her whole world was you."

Mia lowered her eyes, smiling modestly in agreement with Erica. Her grandmother didn't say it often; she was a person of few words, none of them sentimental. But Mia always knew that Lucy was proud of her.

The server returned with their meals, and she and Erica both dug in, the burgers as thick and juicy as Mia remembered.

"So, what are you going to do with the house?" Erica said, swirling a long trail of ketchup onto her fries.

Mia shook her head slowly. "I don't know. I need to sleep there and get used to her…being gone…" She nodded, reinforcing that plan. "And then I'll be able to decide."

"Well, I know what I think you should do," Erica said. "I think you should move back and live here. It's a great little house, right on the water. There are lots of hospitals and pharmaceutical companies around here that conduct medical research. You can do exactly what you're doing in the city now."

Mia smirked. "You, too?" she said. Everyone had ideas for what she should do with the house.

Ryan, who always had his real estate developer hat on, wanted to help her renovate it and then sell it; he was convinced it would earn a mint if they put in a little work. Milt, her grandmother's longtime lawyer and the executor of her will, thought Mia should rent it out, so she could benefit from a steady income without having to make any huge decisions right away. And now it seemed that Erica, who was an elementary school teacher and lived nearby with her physical therapist boyfriend, was hoping she'd move back to town.

They were all good ideas. But Mia didn't know which one was best—or if there was a better alternative she hadn't thought of yet. She didn't see how she could know, when she hadn't set foot in the place since the funeral last month. She had to go into the house and through all of the rooms: hear her footsteps on the wooden floor in the kitchen, now unaccompanied by the shushing of her grandmother's slippers; sink her toes into the old, wool rugs her grandmother had never wanted to waste time replacing despite the worn spots; handle the arms of the kitchen and living room chairs that would no longer resonate with the warmth of her grandmother's long fingers and tiny body. That's how Lucy had taught her to make decisions: You got down and dirty, coming face to face with the evidence available to you. You explored through your senses. And then you moved ahead.

But even before she could get to that point, there was something else. Something her grandmother had left. And although Mia had no idea what it was, she knew it was something she couldn't talk about. Not to Ryan, not even to Erica.

Something for her to find alone.

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