“God... I’m sticking my foot real deep in it every five seconds with you.” Dee slumped back in the seat, the corners of her lips drooping down. She stopped tapping her feet to the music. “Damn.”
Jade’s mouth twitched and she clenched her hand on the gearshift to stop herself from patting the girl in reassurance. It was her tragedy after all, not Dee’s.
The silence from anything but the music felt almost oppressive and Jade bit her lip to stop herself from filling it with her own pointless rambling. This was what waited for her in her hotel room. This and the trying to forget.
But was going to her parents’ house any better?
The side street to her hotel was coming up fast. She eyed it, then watched it pass by. The car rumbled as she shifted and passed a pair of white Priuses in a blur. She needed to get off the major streets. The fastest way to get a cop on her butt was to speed around here. She raced toward the highway, up the on-ramp and darted into the car pool lane, flying fast.
“Cool! This car can really take off!” Dee giggled, her good mood returning with the car’s speed.
Who the hell was this girl?
Hell, who was Jade in this moment?
This woman who ran from her problems wasn’t the real her. Ever since her parents left her to fend for herself, she’d faced everything head-on, convinced that nothing but more pain lay the way of postponing the inevitable.
So far, the only thing she’d been wrong about was the direction of the pain. It wasn’t a single arrow shooting into you once your feet turned in the wrong direction. Instead, it was an ocean, spreading out on all sides, deep and overwhelming. This pain was one of life’s certainties.
“It’s one of the reasons I got it,” Jade said with a twist of her lips. “I thought it would help me run away from my problems.”
Dee chortled. “You’re over twenty-five so you must know better by now.”
Jade looked the slight girl up and down. “Are you over twenty-five?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Obviously you’re making a joke. I’m just mature for my age.” She took another selfie, this one with duck lips, her bright red mouth pointed at the camera like a weapon.
All too soon, they got to the house Jade had been avoiding for days.
“This place is nice.” Dee stepped out of the car and onto the driveway.
Jade firmly closed the driver’s side door, staring up at the two-story colonial-style house she grew up in. “Yeah, it is.”
As a kid, she hadn’t thought they had that much money. Enough to keep her in the latest random stuff she wanted, finance a vacation for the three of them someplace in the Caribbean twice a year and pay the mortgage on the house.
Through the eyes of an adult, she saw that they had been solidly upper middle class, her father a family lawyer and her mother an accountant who mostly worked from home. From what the lawyer’s documents said, the house, three blocks from the lake in a respectable Hollywood neighborhood, was now worth a little over eight hundred thousand dollars. Or a million, if you rounded up.
Jade took the keys out of her pocket and began the walk up the long driveway.
“Why are we here anyway? It looks deserted.” Dee shoved her phone in the back pocket of her tiny shorts and hiked toward the front door at Jade’s side.
At nearly five o’clock in the afternoon, the house did look deserted. No cars in the driveway but Jade’s. Sensor lights clicking on above the door although it wasn’t dark enough for them do any work. The lawn was neatly cut. Immaculate. But the yard and house felt completely empty. And they hadn’t even gotten inside yet.
“I’m here because I need to sell it,” Jade said with a wry twist of her lips. Already, she could feel a tide of something unpleasant pushing at her from her house. Sadness, most likely. Memories. “I’m not sure why you’re here.”
Which was a bit of a lie. She was there as Jade’s distraction. Or a messed-up idea of moral support. Depending on how truthful she was being with herself at the moment.
“Don’t be mean,” Dee said with a tiny frown. She took a quick picture of the house then shoved her phone back into her pocket.
With a twist of the key, Jade unlocked the door. Immediately, the alarm began to wail.
Her parents always had the alarm on, even when they were home. It always made Jade feel trapped. Even leaving her room to get a glass of juice in the middle of the night filled her with dread.
Damn motion sensors. Damn her parents.
Her father had been a controlling hypocrite and the worst of liars. He had a mistress, always quoted the Bible, forbade Jade from knowing anything about birth control and made sure she went to college as innocent as a lamb being led to slaughter. And her mother had let it all happen.
Heart pounding, Jade put in the code the lawyer had given her to silence the screaming alarm and stepped into the house she hadn’t been inside for years. She flicked on the light switch in the hallway.
“Wow...”
Yeah. Wow was right.
The inside of the house looked nothing like the old and antiquated place she remembered. Reddish hardwoods, maybe bamboo, gleamed in the entranceway. A pretty, modern chandelier glittered above their heads. And, as they walked down the hallway and through the rooms, Jade saw that the furniture was all very current, very vibrant.
The house felt so empty. Like they’d renovated it just before they died and never got to enjoy it before the car crash stole their lives.
Staring at everything she saw, Dee went one way in the house and Jade went another. It was as beautiful throughout as it was at the entryway. Elegant, updated, contemporary. What had once been a massive living room had been transformed into a large bedroom suite—bedroom, sitting room, giant walk-in closet—looking out over the pool. The king-size bed was made up with what looked and smelled like brand-new sheets. Even the very air of the room, of the whole house, smelled crisp and untouched. Like Dee said, deserted.
In the kitchen, Jade found stainless steel appliances, a ceramic cooktop and harlequin-tiled floors. Nothing of the dark and kitschy setup she remembered.
This was a home for a modern couple. Which her parents had definitely not been.
“Oh my God!” Dee’s voice came from upstairs.
Jade ran up there to see what Dee was freaking out about. In the hallway, she froze. Or at least what had once been the hallway leading to the other three bedrooms upstairs. All that had been gutted and renovated and turned into...nothing.
“This is amazing!” Dee twirled in the center of the large space.
It was all one big room with a bathroom on each end, tall and gleaming columns of wood breaking up the monotony of the oversize room, like they had been load bearing and couldn’t be removed.
The wall and doors that had once stood between the upstairs patio and two of the bedrooms was now a screen of sliding glass doors looking down to the pool, the rest of the pristine backyard, a garden and the lake.
Nothing was like Jade remembered. Her parents had basically torn out every trace of what the house was.
Dark. Oppressive. And old, but not in a cool way.
Now it felt like a completely different house.
Jade didn’t realize she’d been spinning in disoriented circles, trying to take it all in until she stumbled into one of the columns. She slammed into the textured wood hard enough to bruise. She gasped on a breath of pain.
“Are you okay?” Dee appeared at her side.
“Yeah, yeah.”