“What is it?” the detective says, leaning forward. His hair is thinning on top; I can see the light from the fluorescent bulb shining on his scalp. “Have you remembered something?”

I shake my head. He doesn’t want to know about the day before the wedding. It’s not relevant. It’s not. Then why does my chest feel tight, full of fluttering fear? Why is the night at Dean House so vivid and the wedding a blank?

I look up at the detective. “I remember going upstairs and then I woke up in the ambulance.”

I pick at my nails—is it my blood? My hands are shaking.

I was scared. I didn’t want to go in there. Bella looked on the verge of tears and I wanted to be back in my bed.

The night grew quieter as we dropped into the garden. Even my breath, quick and panicked, sounded muffled. That house had always been the haunted house when we were little kids, daring each other to open the front gate and go up the path. I never did it. I’ve never been the brave kid. Then Julia and Greg Lewis bought it, and what was it then?

Bella marched away around the house and I hurried after her, tripping over tangled tree roots hidden in the weeds. I knew this garden well but it was the house I was afraid of. Bella didn’t stay in the garden, she went right to the front door and opened it. It wasn’t locked.

Wait, why wasn’t it locked?

I’m wondering now if any of it was real, or if it was all part of a dream—haven’t I had this dream before? The house, a rainy night…a scream hidden by the roar of a monsoon-like downpour?

“Bella, what are you doing?”

She glanced back at me and then stepped inside the house.

I can’t tell the detectives any of this; I don’t want to get my sister into trouble. I followed her up the dark hallway, hissing her name, flinching at every creak of the floorboards. What if someone was there? What if Greg came back and found us in his house? He could have had a heart attack.

Bella flitted like a ghost in front of me in her white T-shirt, disappearing through a door on the left. I glanced nervously up the stairs—what monster exactly did I think I’d find?—and followed my sister.