The corridor was familiar. Eve’s body made the turn by muscle memory. Her hand automatically floated up and slid along the textured velvet wallpaper, just like it always had.

And there it was. The scratched oak door with the little wooden sign that said, “Eve’s Room.” She laid her hand on the crystal doorknob that was always a little loose.

And stood there.

Okay, this was dumb. It was just a room.

She pushed open the door and…it was not just a room. All the circuits in her body fired at once. Tears surged to the corners of her eyes. Blood rushed to her head.

She swiped at the tears, took a deep breath to counter the dizziness, and stepped inside. Or did she step back in time? It was the same thing. The room was unchanged, just as Jason said. Pale-pink walls, hot-pink ceramic tile floors—hot-pink tile floors. As an adult, she marveled that Lucille had given her—at age nine—free rein to redo the room however she wanted. Heck, as an adult, she marveled that Lucille had kept a room for her year-round, even though she spent only two months a year here.

She stepped farther in. The double bed that took up most of the floor space was the same. It was covered with a black-and-white-checkered quilt—teenage Eve had tried to temper some of nine-year-old Eve’s extreme devotion to pink with what she’d thought of as more mature decor choices. That was why there was only one poster of Ariel left on the wall—teenage Eve hadn’t wanted to totally eviscerate nine-year-old Eve’s vision—among the more “mature” Eiffel Tower prints that comprised the room’s second generation of art.

And there was the vanity with its photographs stuck into the edge of the mirror. The vanity was black to match the bedspread. Sawyer had helped her strip it—it had originally been pink—and repaint it.

The bookshelves that covered one wall—also made by Sawyer, who’d had a serious woodworking hobby but not much of a venue to indulge it—were the same color. If she looked closely, she had no doubt she would find her beloved old books. The Grimm brothers, but also The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Harry Potter.

She did not look closely.

She wasn’t sure why she was so freaked out about this room in particular. Maybe because it had been hers. Her parents’ house in Toronto was a tiny one-bedroom bungalow. Her “bedroom” had been an alcove off the living room that her parents had curtained off. They had been scrupulous about respecting her privacy, but there was no door. You couldn’t knock on a curtain.

This place, however, had been hers.