“Yes,” she whispered. “I understand.”

She would believe, because it was easy when the alternative was believing in nothing at all.

12

SHE’S HAVING AN affair,” Lucas confessed.

Mark readjusted the cardboard box held fast in his arms and stared up at his friend. Lucas loomed in the shadowed interior of the moving truck. “Are you . . .” He paused, as if trying to find the precise words to convey his surprise. “I mean, you’re sure, right? You’re sure?”

Lucas frowned, looked down at the box next to his feet. He felt claustrophobic. The walls of the truck seemed to inch inward as rain pelted the roof with fat, lazy drops. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything, he thought. Maybe confessing that my worst nightmare is taking place will somehow solidify Caroline’s intent. Perhaps Caroline was right that Lucas had developed some weird inferiority complex. His insecurities were manifesting themselves into the ugly illusion that the woman he loved was a villain, a heartless bitch that was reveling in his misery. But how do you know that she isn’t?

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Lucas crouched, slid his fingers beneath the bottom edges of a particularly heavy box, and lifted with his knees.

“What the hell are you talking about? Of course you should have brought it up. Suddenly we’ve got secrets between us?”

Lucas stepped around Mark and hopped out of the truck. Wet splotches of rain bloomed against brown cardboard. He didn’t wait for Mark to follow him inside. If anything, he’d use the rain as an excuse to gain some momentary distance. It would give him a minute to breathe past the emotion welling up inside his throat.

Mark followed him inside the foyer a few seconds later, but neither of them spoke. They walked to their designated areas—Lucas to his new study just off the living room, Mark to the kitchen with a clattering box of pots and pans. When they met back at the truck a minute later, their conversation continued uninterrupted.

“I wasn’t going to keep it from you, I just don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about it.” Lucas climbed back into the truck, slid his fingers through his hair. “Because if she can cheat on me now, she’s always been capable of doing it, right? Hell, maybe she’s done it before and I was too stupid to notice I married—”

“A fake,” Mark finished. “A cheating slut.”

The scorn in Mark’s voice, his disgusted expression, made Lucas feel better about allowing his grief to metastasize into rage. Mark knew how these things went. Years ago, Mark had been married to his high school sweetheart. Amanda had been a pretty girl with vibrant red hair and a smile that could stop even the most steadfast heart. Mark and Amanda had their standard problems. She griped about Mark leaving his cereal bowl in the sink every morning; he complained about Mandy hogging all the closet space with her endless racks of clothes. But it had all been lighthearted, the kind of fodder a loving couple stores up for harmless dinnertime jabs. And then, one day, Amanda started taking it far more seriously than Mark could comprehend. Suddenly, the cereal bowl was a personal affront, his quiet mutterings about closet space a code for her crowding him. Out of nowhere, Amanda decided that maybe they both needed a break. Mark panicked, tried to fix a problem he didn’t even understand with gifts and pleading and subordination. It didn’t work. A few months later, she sat him down and told him it was over. That, and she was keeping the house.

At first, all Mark could think was that it had all been his fault. He and Lucas spent hours on the phone while Mark racked his brain, trying to figure out what he had done wrong. How could he repair it? How could he fix himself? He started seeing a therapist, spent two hours a week spitting self-depreciation at a hired stranger, all in the hopes of finding some answers. After months of dumping money into a shrink that wasn’t helping, he found out Amanda had been sleeping with someone else. It had been going on for over a year.

Lucas had then watched his best friend live through a nightmare. He had listened to stories of how Mark had to pack up his things, how he had tossed out photos and hung Amanda’s wedding dress dead center where all his stuff used to hang in the closet—just a little reminder of the lifelong promise she had broken. She had gone so far as keeping the dog, even though she hadn’t wanted a pet in the first place. Goober the golden retriever was now living somewhere in Seattle with “the megabitch.” That was six years ago. Mark still hated her guts, and probably would until the day he died.

Lucas was terrified to find himself in a similar situation. Except, instead of Goober the yellow-haired dog, he and Caroline would be battling over Virginia the yellow-haired girl.

A scream sounded from somewhere inside the house, muffled by the rain but definitely distinct as it slithered out the open double doors. The sound of it weakened Lucas’s knees. His grip on the box in his arms slipped, the box slamming against the truck’s floor with a hollow thud. Another crunch. More broken glass.

Mark twisted to look over his shoulder, but Lucas was already running. He leaped from the truck and bolted for the house, crushed gravel flying out from beneath the soles of his shoes.

Both men bounded into the house like a pair of heroes only to stop short. Jeanie stood at the top of the stairs. She was bleeding, a vibrant red dribble inching its way down the side of her face, her left eyebrow in full bloom.

Lucas sprinted up the stairs, the rush of adrenaline making his head spin. By the time he reached the top riser, he was sure he was about to pass out from the sickening surge of panic. But rather than tumbling back down the stairs to the redbrick floor below, he caught his kid by the shoulders and stared at her, startled by the swath of red that dappled her skin.

“Jesus, what happened?” Alarm shot through his bloodstream when, rather than responding, Jeanie only cried. She reached out to touch the gash across the ridge of her eye. All the while, that nagging sense of being in the wrong refused to leave Lucas’s thoughts.

This was a mistake.

A bad idea.

This house wasn’t meant to be lived in by anyone, not after the things that had happened within these walls.

But the voice of reason chimed in just as it always did. You’re overreacting. This isn’t a horror movie. Halcomb’s house hadn’t stood empty for thirty years. Despite its gruesome history, people had occupied the place on the regular up until a few years ago. These were simple enough details to look up through Realtor sites and public records. And yet, there was his kid, crying, bleeding, looking afraid.

“Jeanie?” She met his insistence with more sobbing, as though speaking her name only amplified her hysteria. “Virginia!” He shook her by the shoulder, hoping it would snap her out of what Caroline used to call the screaming-meemies.

“Hey, kid!” Mark leaned down to meet her gaze, snapping his fingers at her face. “Hey! Chill out. What the hell happened?”

She managed to whisper, “I fell,” her words stifled by weeping she couldn’t control.

“Fell from where?” Lucas asked.

“The tub. I was hanging up my pj’s and I . . .”

Both men looked through the open bathroom door. Jeanie’s pajamas hung akimbo from the tension rod. A small blotch of red stood out in gruesome contrast against the lip of the blue enamel tub.

“Oh man. Christ . . . you could have killed yourself,” Lucas told her.

“You can’t join the circus if you’re dead, kid,” Mark said.