“Are you sure about this?” Bronte rebalances the box in her hands, using her knee to get a firmer grip. I mirror the move, flex my aching fingers against the cardboard of my own box, wishing I had Bronte’s athleticism. She’s not even sweating. A drip of moisture trickles over the puckered scar on my calf. The stitches came out last week, but it’s still a mottled pink, hard to miss. And, God, the itching.

“Yeah,” I say, nudging the kitchen door open with my hip. We crunch across the gravel to Suzanne’s carriage house. “I can’t live there right now. Trapped alone with all her things. Unless you want to move in. Keep me company?”

“I don’t want to live in a haunted house, either.” A joke on the surface, with reality crackling beneath. Some papers have called it a “house of horrors,” as if Maura were butchering bodies in the basement. Or maybe it’s because of how she died.

“Besides,” Bronte adds, “Mom loves our house. And we can finally pay off the mortgage, do some renovations with the book-deal money.”

Maura’s agent snapped Mrs. Escano up and got her a six-figure deal to write a murder town tell-all. Suzanne joked that publishing is glacially slow except when it’s not. Half the town is grumbling they didn’t get to the payday first. Plenty of them have appeared on the news, though.

“I may have gotten the shit knocked out of me when that bitch cut my brakes, but I’m well enough to tell them to fuck off,” Suzanne has been saying all week. And Maura did cut her brakes. Then she bribed the auto shop to lie about it on the official report.

To my surprise, Suzanne intends to stick around, at least until probate for Maura’s estate is settled and until I both turn eighteen and graduate from high school. Maura had too much hubris to think she’d really die, so the throwaway will she made years ago stands. Suzanne is the executor of her estate, and I’m the sole heir. It would have been my grandmother’s Fuck you to my mom, had she lived—passing over her daughter to manipulate me with her millions.

Well, fuck you, Maura: I have half a mind to tear the whole place down. But for now, finishing out my senior year cohabitating with Suzanne while I decide what to do with the Ellis mansion will do. A part of me knows the house is too spectacular to get rid of. But I still might throw all of Maura’s things onto the lawn and light a bonfire. We’ll see.

Gabriel’s coming out of my new bedroom—the guest room in Suzanne’s cozy cottage—as Bronte and I sweep in with the last of my boxes.