I stay crouched there, long empty minutes, the room darkening as the sun goes down. Her shirt is wet. I am crying, clutching her rag doll body and making guttural, primal sounds.

I tuck her in, straighten her hair, close her eyelids. A regal corpse.

And for a fraction of a moment, I feel something like relief. My stomach uncoils. She’s gone. She’s gone forever. All of this madness is over.

But as the sun flits away, the shadowy memories that live in this house close in on me. They’re drawn to my scent, the greedy contours of this home that forget nothing. I’m defenseless against them. Even if I wanted to get up, get out, I can’t. I can’t leave her, these walls remind me, this woman who coveted me.

So I burrow under the blanket beside her, resting my face on the clean, fluffed pillow. I close my eyes and inhale the floral scent of laundry detergent. I put my arm around her. Months of sleepless nights and newly expelled wrath weigh heavy on me as the walls descend upon me, muddling my vision and rendering me catatonic, their murmurs preventing me from fully comprehending what I’ve done.

Through a window, I hear a car. A knock on the door. “It’s Mike from Yellow Checker. You tried calling! Just checking up on you, see if you got a ride! Sounded kinda tense over here.”

He will have to wait. I’m already falling asleep, plummeting into it, my thoughts jumbling the closer I get to the edge.

At the precipice of sleep, I’m beckoned, Annie’s sweet voice filtering through the house’s bones. A taunt. A promise. “Oh honey. I’m not going anywhere.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have dreamed of writing an acknowledgments page for a long time. I love reading them and have thought again and again about whom I would thank in my own. So without further ado...

Thank you to my brilliant editor, April Osborn, for her unparalleled championing of this book and its potential and for pushing me to make these characters deliciously darker and more despicable. Thank you to the MIRA team: Ashley McDonald, Ana Luxton, Lindsey Reeder, Shay Loeffelholz, Sean Kapitain and Jennifer Stimson.

Thank you to my agent, Stephen Barbara, a god among men, for his constant advocation of my work, his continued belief in me and what wild stories I could produce, his friendship, and most important of all, his quick email response rate. Thank you to the team at Inkwell, including Maria Whalen, who helped move my baby along and bring it into the world, and Alexis Hurley for all her work with foreign rights. Thank you to Sharon Chudnow, who enthusiastically read early drafts of this work and steered me in many right directions.

Thank you to Andrea Robinson for making me a better editor and Danielle Dieterich for her insightful notes.