I hear my own footsteps before I see the house.
The drive up the narrow peninsula road feels shorter than it used to, the back way the locals take to avoid the manicured town center’s watchful eyes. Salt hangs thick in the air, mixing with woodsmoke from chimneys in Harbor Glen and that faint, sterile note that rides up from the hospital on the hill. By the time I pull through the open iron gates, my tongue tastes like all three—ocean, fire, disinfectant—layered on top of each other.
I park where the valet stand used to be, in front of the wide stone steps. No one rushes out to open my door. No staff in tailored coats, no silver trays of cider, no Mercer crest discreetly embroidered on lapels. The crest still stares down from the carved stone over the door, those abstract waves frozen mid-crash, but the brass looks duller than I remember.
“All right,” I tell the steering wheel. “Once more into the very expensive haunted house.”
My breath fogs the windshield. I shut off the engine and step out into air that bites the inside of my nose, then climb the steps, keys cold in my palm. The front door is unlocked, per court order; the independent review team has been in and out for days. I push it open and walk into the echo.
That’s what hits me first. Echo.
The entrance hall used to muffle everything with thick rugs and layered drapes and the constant soft footfall of staff. Now my boots click on bare wood and bounce back from the high ceiling. The Mercer crest mosaic in the floor stares up unobstructed, no longer framed by Oriental runners. Blue painter’s tape X’s mark the walls where portraits once hung. A few remaining pieces of furniture wear dangling white tags with lot numbers in black marker.
“Estate Sale – Lot 42,” I read aloud from a tag tied to the newel post of the grand staircase. “One carefully curated illusion of permanence.”
My voice sounds small in the hollow space. I let the front door fall shut behind me. The latch rings out, sharper than it ever was when the house was full.
The scent inside has changed. Less pine from holiday garlands, more dust and packing materials, with a faint trace of lemon polish sinking under the stronger smell of cold air. Somewhere upstairs, a window must be open a crack; I catch a thread of salt and the distant roar of the Sound folding into the silence.
I move through the hall on autopilot, past the empty hooks where guests once hung cashmere coats, past the donor wall Evelyn installed to impress visiting benefactors. The engraved names are still there, tiered by giving level, Harbor Glen’s hierarchy etched in brass. Some plates bear fresh strips of blue tape and notes in block letters: “HOLD FOR LEGAL,” “PENDING FOUNDATION RESTRUCTURE.”
I touch my own name where it sits in small print next to Daniel’s, on the “Next Generation Leadership Circle.” Someone has slapped a piece of tape over it with a single word: REVIEW.
“Join the club,” I mutter.
I should go straight to our bedroom—my old bedroom—and pack, but my feet steer me down the corridor instead. The rugs are gone here too, leaving pale rectangular ghosts on the sun-faded floors. Without them, I can hear the house’s bones: the creak of boards under my weight, the faint hum of the heating system, the distant crash of waves against rock.
When I first arrived here for Christmas, the quiet felt luxurious. Now it feels like the silence in a hospital hallway at three a.m., the kind that means something has gone very wrong behind a closed door.
I force myself to turn back, up the staircase that tried to swallow me once. The runner that slipped under my feet is gone; only staple holes and lighter strips of wood mark where it clung for years. Auction tags sprout from the carved banister: “Lot 27 – Hand-carved mahogany staircase, 1903, dismantle with care.” I run my fingers along the railing where my hand once caught just in time and imagine someone taking it apart piece by piece, the illusion of solidity unspooling into planks.
At the second-floor landing, I stop outside what used to be our room. The door stands ajar. Inside, the bed is stripped, mattress bare except for a plastic cover. My dresses hang limp in the closet, half of them already gone in the hurried exodus weeks ago. I pull a suitcase from under the bed, the wheels bumping on the floor, and start folding what’s left: sweaters that still carry the faint perfume of the estate’s laundry detergent, jeans that smelled like woodsmoke after evenings by the fire.
“You don’t live here,” I remind myself under my breath. “You never really did.”
The words land heavy and also a little light.
I pack practical things: jeans, boots, the few dresses that feel like mine instead of costumes. I wrap the framed photo from our wedding in a sweater and hesitate, then slide it back onto the shelf instead. The people in that picture are real and so completely lost I’m not sure bringing them to my new life will help either of us.
The suitcase fills faster than I expect. The house provided everything else—dishes, linens, a curated personality. I zip it shut and leave it by the door, then stand there, listening.
The third floor calls to me.
For years it was forbidden territory, the wing devoted to Lydia, the dead daughter whose name hovered over every holiday like incense and smoke. Evelyn kept it locked and immaculate, grief turned into museum. I used to stand at the bottom of those stairs and feel the weight of a story I wasn’t allowed to read.
The court order changed that. So did the independent review. The third floor has been unlocked for weeks now, technically available to investigators.
I’ve been avoiding it.
I cross the landing and start up the narrower staircase, my footsteps snapping in the enclosed space. At the top, the door stands open, doorstop wedged under it. A strip of yellow tape hangs limply from the frame, “ACCESS LOGGED” printed along its length. I swallow and step through.
The air is cooler up here, thinner, holding more dust. Light spills from half-open curtains, streaking across a hallway lined with family photos I’ve never seen. Young Daniel with braces, Lydia on a bike, Robert in an embarrassing sweater. Evelyn, younger and softer around the eyes, holding a baby swaddled in a hospital blanket with the Mercer crest patterned along the border.
“Hi,” I whisper to the baby, to the ghost of whoever she is in that picture. “We’re working on it.”
Lydia’s door stands at the end of the hall, brass plaque still polished. The name looks wrong now that I know another daughter’s existence was scrubbed so clean it took decades to find her.
I nudge the door open with my knuckles.
The room smells like lavender sachets and stale air. The wallpaper—pale green with tiny white flowers—peels at the seams. A canopy bed dominates one wall, the once-pristine coverlet now slightly caved in where people have sat for interviews and photographs over the years. A vanity stands opposite, its mirror reflecting the empty doorway, the tags, me.
Auction stickers bloom here too. “Lot 103 – Antique vanity.” “Lot 104 – Four-poster bed.” Some items are already gone, leaving dustless squares on the shelves: a missing row of trophies, a gap between bookends. The whole room feels like a staged crime scene after the main evidence has been bagged.
I drift toward the desk beneath the window. Lydia’s name is scratched into the wood corner in tiny letters. Beside it, I notice a second set of letters carved lighter, finer, like someone’s smaller hand borrowed the same defiance: R I.
The second half of the name isn’t there. The letters trail off into a shallow, frustrated gouge, then a smooth patch where the wood has been sanded and refinished. Only the faintest ghost of the R and I remain when the light hits them just right.
“She was here,” I say.
My voice wobbles. I steady it.
“You were both here,” I correct.
I open drawers. Most hold yellowed stationery, dried-out pens, ticket stubs from concerts older than I am. One contains a stack of glossy eight-by-tens from memorial programs—Lydia’s face smiling up in that frozen way people do when they don’t know their photo will be used to mark the end of their story.
I put them back and close the drawer softly.
A narrow door near the corner catches my eye. I remember Evelyn mentioning a linen closet up here once, a throwaway line meant to sound casual and controlled. There’s a strip of blue tape across the door, now cut.
I pull it open.
The closet is deeper than I expect, shelves holding mismatched boxes and plastic bins. Some lids carry stickers from the independent review team, notes about contents. I scan labels: “L. Mercer – childhood,” “holiday décor,” “misc.” My fingers hesitate, then land on a small cardboard box shoved to the back on the floor, no label, edges soft from years of being moved aside.
“Of course,” I murmur. “You never label the things you don’t want anyone to find.”
I drag it out, the cardboard scraping against the shelf, and lift the lid.
Inside, a jumble of toys stares back: a stuffed whale with one eye, fur worn down to the fabric on its belly; a set of wooden blocks with teeth marks on the corners; board books with rounded edges designed for toddlers who drop everything they touch. These are too young for the age Lydia died, toys for a child much smaller than the girl immortalized in photos downstairs.
I pick up the whale. The fabric is rough under my fingers, the stuffing shifted in clumps. There’s a faded tag near the tail from the hospital gift shop, the Mercer crest printed beside a cartoon wave.
Underneath the toys, a rolled-up growth chart lies curled like a shed skin. I unroll it carefully. Cartoon waves march up the side, space for a child’s name at the top. Someone has written “Lydia” in Evelyn’s neat, looping script, then, faintly, in pencil underneath and to the side, another name in less practiced letters: Riley.
The pencil has been erased, hard enough to wrinkle the paper, but the indentation remains. Below, height marks appear in two inks—one dark, one faint—and two different handwritings. In the margin near a lower mark, someone has scrawled “4 yrs!!” with a wonky exclamation point that looks nothing like Evelyn’s controlled hand.
My throat tightens.
“You got one birthday chart,” I say to the empty closet, to the erased pencil line. “And then you got erased.”
Wind whistles faintly at the window, a thin, lonely sound.
I roll the chart back up and tuck it carefully into my bag. The whale goes in too. The rest I leave, evidence and memory and plastic, for the official boxes.
Standing in the doorway of Lydia’s room, I turn in a slow circle. The space is both shrine and warehouse now, grief packaged for sale. Love lived here. Real love, in the way Daniel talked about his sister, in the way Robert’s face softened in those few unguarded stories. Harm lived here too, in the choice to make one child a saint and another a secret, both of them tools in a story Evelyn controlled.
“I’m done living in your exhibit,” I whisper to the room, to the woman who curated it.
The house doesn’t answer. It just creaks.
I back out of the third-floor wing and close the door behind me, more out of habit than necessity. On the way downstairs, my hand slides over the railing one last time. I imagine the auctioneer rattling off lot numbers, strangers dismantling the banister, carrying away chunks of wood that remember every hand that clutched them during storms and fights and near-falls.
Instead of heading straight for the front door, I veer toward the glass-walled sitting room that overlooks the cliffs. The room is gutted, couches gone, coffee tables reduced to labeled skeletons. The glass still offers the same sweeping view of the Sound, gray-green and restless under a pale sky. The winter air presses cold against the panes.
A side door to the terrace stands unlocked. I push it open and step out into the wind.
The cliffs roar beneath me, waves slamming into rock with the steady, ruthless rhythm they’ve kept long before any Mercer decided to build a kingdom here. The air is sharp enough to sting my eyes. I taste salt on my lips, grit from the path under my boots, a hint of smoke from someone’s fireplace down the peninsula.
The memorial tree stands where it always has, branches bare now, no fairy lights or ribbon. The little plaque at its base still names Lydia and the date of the boating accident, no mention of another missing child on that day, no asterisk for lives folded into the gaps.
I walk up to the tree and rest my palm against the trunk. The bark is rough, cool.
“You deserved better,” I tell Lydia. “You both did.”
My breath slips out in clouds, thin offerings to the cold.
I close my eyes and let the wind push against me. For a moment, I see the life I thought I was getting when I first drove up this hill: holidays by this tree, kids running along this path, my name moving up the donor walls in polite little steps. A future built on the idea that the Mercers were the solid ground under my feet.
That future is auction inventory now. It’s in the tags hanging from the banister and the empty hooks on the walls and the sealed boxes of adoption files headed toward a courtroom instead of a shredder.
“I’m done wanting this,” I say, and the words surprise me by how true they feel in my mouth.
I slide my house key from my pocket and weigh it in my hand. The metal carries tiny dents, a life’s worth of doors locked and unlocked. I kneel and set it gently on the plaque beside Lydia’s name, then step back.
Leaving the key here doesn’t change the legal realities—I still have rights and obligations that will play out in offices and hearings—but it changes something in me. I don’t need a symbol of access to a place that was never safe.
The tide crashes below, unbothered.
I stand there until my fingers go numb, until my ears ache from the wind, until the salt and woodsmoke and that distant sterile note have braided themselves into something I can breathe without choking. I don’t know exactly what life looks like away from this house, away from these cliffs and their stories. I only know that it won’t be written on donor walls or growth charts someone can erase.
When I finally turn back toward the empty house, the glass reflects my figure instead of Evelyn’s, small but solid. Somewhere beyond the driveway, down the back road that bypasses Harbor Glen’s perfect center, there is a motel room and a cramped apartment and a park bench and an office yet to be rented where new stories will start.
I walk inside, grab my suitcase, and step through the front door without looking back, leaving the auction tags, the memorial tree, and a silver key on the cliff to face whatever truth comes next when strangers start opening every locked room I’ve left behind.