“And did he?”

Before she speaks, I know the answer. My mother has that uncanny ability to draw specific memories from the house, to conjure up what she thinks she wants to see. I imagine my mother, desperate, pleading with the house to show her what she thought she wanted to see, using her witchy designs to make the house do her bidding, burning a lock of his hair, placing small tokens of his around her, until the house relented and revealed to her its secrets, as it always did.

“Yes.”

The long quiet, again, as if our conversation exists only in the pools of light cast by the intermittent streetlamps.

“I watched him hang himself. Again … and again …” Her voice goes whisper-soft. “And again.”

There she is, in my mind, watching the terrible act with morbid desperation, the endless repetition of it, and I feel something terrible inside me, in my throat.

“I drove myself mad, watching. And you know what I learned?” She waits a beat. “Nothing.”

“So you hid the key.”

She nods. “I couldn’t have you girls wandering in there.”

“Did you … did you ever find anything else in that room? Anything that might have explained why he did it?”

The corners of her mouth drag down. “I wish I had.”

I am moments away from telling her about the journal, my mouth open to divulge his secret, thinking the answer she sought all those years ago must be within those yellowed pages—but the sight of home approaching just ahead stifles the words in my throat. It would only hurt her to reopen this wound. And what if there isn’t a good reason, a real answer, hidden within those intricate writings after all? What if, seeing the madness playing out upon those pages, she plunges back into the weight of grief, knowing that something so terrible was lurking in her husband’s mind all along, something she couldn’t see?

I just want to protect her. I know what she’s like when she breaks.

I roll down the window, and a cold wind unfurls through the car. She glances at me, but I say nothing. The cold air whips me awake, lifts my hair over my eyes.

In the end, I don’t tell her. I pull through the wrought-iron gate and down the long driveway with tree roots disturbing the cracking pavement, toward the looming endless labyrinth of memories and rooms and locked doors.

Mother sleeps heavily tonight.

My thoughts are spinning, and I cannot sleep a wink. It is always like this, when the more I want to sleep, the more I convince myself to sleep, the less able I am, and I grow too hot for the covers so I cast them off, and my ear hurts pressed into the flat old pillow so I turn to my other side, and now I am too cold on that side so I pull the covers back up and stretch my legs out, pondering the end of the bed with my toes.