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Back The Lighthouse Save as PDF
Chapters (50)
  1. PART ONE
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. PART TWO
  13. 12
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 18
  18. 19
  19. 21
  20. 22
  21. 23
  22. 24
  23. 25
  24. 26
  25. 27
  26. 28
  27. 30
  28. 31
  29. 32
  30. 33
  31. 34
  32. 35
  33. 36
  34. 37
  35. 38
  36. 39
  37. 40
  38. 41
  39. 42
  40. 43
  41. PART THREE
  42. 44
  43. 45
  44. 46
  45. 47
  46. 49
  47. 50
  48. 51
  49. 52
  50. EPILOGUE

“No . . . I don’t. A few, I guess. A handful? I don’t know.” Amy blinked rapidly. Her chest was feeling sore, her stomach suddenly full of knots. “Mom, what’s happening? Why are you talking about those pills?”

“Because you swallowed too many of them. Those pills you took didn’t send you off to sleep—they knocked you unconscious. You slipped under the water, you didn’t wake up, and that’s when your spirit made its way here. Your body is still in that bathtub, sweetheart. Right now, as we speak, that’s where you are. You’re back at the hotel, still lying in the water.”

31

31

Ryan couldn’t believe his eyes. All his private paperwork—­months’ worth of bank statements and letters and overdue bills—dumped across the kitchen floor. And there was his father, sitting in a chair right smack in the middle of it. Ryan had known this moment would come, had dreaded it for four years, but this was the absolute worst of worst-case scenarios. Never had he imagined confronting such a situation; in all his days and nights of lost sleep, never had he pictured his father finding out the truth like this.

“Dad?”

Ryan entered the kitchen, traipsing lightly across the sheets of paper. His father wasn’t answering him. His gaze was locked on the letter in his hands. Ryan resisted the urge to deconstruct the scene and start asking questions. Exactly how this had all happened was irrelevant. His father’s world was in the process of being turned upside down and the only thing that mattered now was minimizing the damage.

“Dad, it’s me. Are you okay?” Ryan knelt beside the chair and examined his father’s face for clues, for traces of anger, sadness, confusion, any sign at all that would let him know what was going on inside his head. “Can you hear me, Dad?”

But his father, who hadn’t acknowledged Ryan’s presence, remained deathly silent for a few seconds longer, until he finally said quietly, “What’s the meaning of all this, Son?”

Ryan put a hand on his father’s back. “Dad, listen, there’s something I need—”

“This letter here says we have to vacate the property, they say we have to l-leave . . . The bank, they want to th-throw us out.”

Ryan could hear the cracks in his father’s voice, the fracturing in his words, his faintly slurred speech. Swallowing hard, he nervously put his other hand on his father’s arm and tried to extricate him from the chair. “How about we get up, huh? Let’s go someplace else, okay?”

His father didn’t budge. “This can’t be right,” he protested. His lips were quivering, and his eyes were making frenetic dashes back and forth across the page. “There must be . . . a m-mistake . . . a ­t-t-terrible mistake. Right, Son?”