He’d been debating not coming back at all, knowing how easy it would be to stay in the music room with Delilah, to ignore all of this and remain lost in her. They could have caught a bus later this morning, left town with very little fanfare. Maybe they would have been able to drive that unknown distance that would put them truly out of reach of House. Delilah would be eighteen in a few days. He would be eighteen in just over two weeks. He wasn’t sure which of the two of them would be less likely to find someone coming after them.
He knew leaving would have been the smart thing. He knew he should have tried. Dhaval’s text had changed everything. But the farther away Gavin was from the music room and his conversation with Dhaval, the more certain he became that House was toying with him, finding a way to mimic a woman’s voice on the phone. But if there was a chance—no matter how small—that his mom was there, inside somewhere, he had to look.
His heart seemed to be trying to claw out of his chest. His pulse was jagged, leaping and unsteady, and it was distracting enough for Gavin to wonder whether he could take the panic of facing this dark beast in front of him.
Closing his eyes, he struggled to steady his breaths as he made a small mental list of tasks:
Get inside. Listen for my mother. Gather what I need and get out. Find Delilah.
Find Delilah.
Delilah.
He didn’t have much in the way of possessions and had never considered himself to be overly sentimental—he’d never really felt like the things in House belonged to him anyway—but now that he was standing outside, there were a handful of items he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving behind. He wanted the Bible he’d found and he wanted the photograph of his mom. He couldn’t dream of leaving his sketchbooks behind, and if it were possible, he wanted to find the keys to the car. If he could somehow manage to get those, he could have his things and a way for them to leave town, too. Running away would be a lot easier in the Buick than on a bike.
To be safe, he parked the bike outside Iron Gate in case the worst happened and he couldn’t get the car, and he headed for House.
Gate didn’t open on its own the way it usually did, and so he pushed it open with a groan, coming to an abrupt stop when he stepped into the yard. Not only was Chimney silent, but the lawn looked. . . dead. Really dead, both sides. The grass was brown and brittle, and weeds grew in the cracks between the pavers that led to the front door. House looked well and truly abandoned—abandoned for years—as if his entire life had never happened.
The vines that wound themselves around the columns on the front porch were spindly, and the purple petals of the new blossoms as delicate and dry as old paper, dropping one by one into a small pile on the top step. Gavin wasn’t sure what to make of all this, and he briefly wondered if maybe House had. . . left? Maybe his mom had come home and House was gone because he didn’t need it anymore.
He didn’t know how to process that. On the one hand, that was the point of all of this, wasn’t it? To get away? To live his own life? So why did he feel that familiar panic? That tremor in his hands at the thought of being alone?
“I’m home,” he called, standing in the foyer, and clenched his jaw when the urge to shout Mom? became almost too much to bear. He did his best to keep his hands steady while he unzipped his hoodie and hung it on a hook near the door. He kept his shoes on.
Gavin looked down the hall and listened for the sound of footsteps in one of the other rooms, or from someplace upstairs. Nothing.
“Where is everyone?” he asked, careful to keep the quiver from his voice.
Fireplace flickered to life, the low flames sputtering around the ever-present log.
So something was still here, but no mother stepped out of the shadows. He tried to ignore the feeling in his stomach, as if a trapdoor had opened in his diaphragm and his heart had dropped straight through.