Cover

ALSO BY ALEXA DONNE

The Ivies

Dedication

For those who grieve, however they grieve, and come out the other side

CHAPTER ONE

Some people attract death.

When I was nine, my pet rabbit, Easter, flopped out of my arms while Mom was cleaning her cage, and my bunny’s back snapped in two. The fall didn’t kill Easter, but we had to take her to the vet to put her down. I didn’t cry.

When I was six, Granddad went to the angels. That’s how my grandmother put it. Mom had a more literal take. “He’s dead!” she screamed at her mother. Wailed. It was the first time I ever saw my mom cry.

Then there was our dog, five years ago. My chemistry teacher, who was felled by an aneurysm when I was in ninth grade. The pretty junior girl my sophomore year, DOA in a horrific highway crash.

I am just shy of my eighteenth birthday and on my sixth funeral.

It’s the worst kind of funeral that brings me to Seaview and my grandmother’s creepy-as-hell Victorian mansion off Main Street. (Yeah, this place has a Main Street.) The peeling velvet wallpaper is straight from a Poe story.

“It’s original hardwood!” my grandmother says. “People shit themselves for floors like mine!” She sweeps across said floors, which surely hide long-desiccated corpses, without hesitation. I pause at the threshold, the porch creaking beneath my feet. If I step over, follow this strange yet eerily familiar woman inside, it will be real. I will live here now.

But I don’t exactly have a choice. Everything I own has been packed up, sold off, or put in storage. It’s this or foster care. Maura Weston is the only family I have left. Even if I barely know her, legally she’s my guardian. This is my home.

My mom is dead, and I’m living with a stranger.

I step through the doorway. Look up the grand staircase to the landing, where Mrs. Danvers is surely waiting. But it’s only Maura and me in this cavernous Victorian relic.

“Call me Grandma,” she’d said on the drive from the airport. “My fans call me Maura. You’re not a fan, are you, dear?”

It seemed like a trick question.

“I read the one set on the boat,” I’d said, and it appeared to please her.

“That was a New York Times bestseller,” she said, beaming.

A lot of them are New York Times bestsellers.

“You’ll be on the fourth floor,” she tells me now. “You have your own bathroom, so lots of privacy. Plus, you have those gloriously young knees, for all those stairs. Suzanne’s in the carriage house out back. You’ll meet her in the morning.”