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Prologue
Rhett
Darkness lay outside the large windows of my new bedroom, and silence had long since fallen throughout the rest of the house.
Ten-thirty, my alarm clock read, much too late for a twelve-year-old to be up according to Mom.
She and Dad slept in the master suite on the floor below me while I sat cross-legged on my bed, unable to relax after a day of lugging boxes up three flights of stairs.
My parents had moved us three towns south the day after I’d finished the seventh grade, and I missed the comfort of my old bedroom, the safe place I could hide in to ensure I didn’t disappoint them.
The four walls of my supposed new escape surrounding me didn’t put me at ease. Rather, they seemed to push inward, threatening the stoicism that had been ingrained in my head at too young of an age.
Instead of thinking about the strange, unsettled feeling inside my stomach, I forced my mind toward easing my tension…and a way to flee from the disquiet of a bedroom that didn’t feel like home.
A plan formed in my head, giving me something to focus on, and I snagged hold of it.
Stomach tight and hands clammy, I hopped up, tugged on my sneakers, and quietly crept into the hallway. No lights shone from the stairwell, so I slipped down a flight and held my breath.
My parents didn’t make a peep from behind their closed bedroom door.
One last scurry down another set of stairs, and I stood in the massive house’s entryway.
Dad had already quizzed me on the alarm system, so I snuck outside into the warm night air with no one the wiser, filling my lungs for what seemed like the first time in months since I’d learned we were moving closer to Boston.
Dad’s new job came with a lot more money, and even though neither of my parents showed much emotion, both seemed quite pleased to have climbed higher in the ladder.
Me? Not so much. I didn’t care about money, cars, and being someone. I just wanted peace and quiet—but more than the fake kind that had always lay over our house.
Sure, with only the three of us, home had always been on the silent side. But peace? I didn’t understand the word and hadn’t felt anything but restless for as long as I could remember.
Unless I’d been closed up in my old bedroom.
“And now I don’t even have that anymore,” I muttered to myself, yanking my bike off the ground from where one of the movers had left it alongside the garage.
Settled on the narrow seat, I pedaled down the driveway, intent on getting away from the scene of my newfound misery. Without knowing the neighborhood, I chose left and just kept riding since we’d come into town by that route earlier in the day.
Trees and houses lined the dimly lit road, eventually giving way to thicker woods I remembered that had spread out eastward beyond a large cemetery.
My legs burned after the long hours of climbing stairs with box after box, but I kept pushing until I couldn’t go any further. Heart thundering, I slowed alongside a wrought-iron fence separating me from the graveyard. My pants for air sounded loud in the still night, broken only by a lonely owl somewhere in the distance.
Moonlight shone through the towering maple trees to my left, touching headstones like creepy ghost fingers, but I felt no need to flee.
My insides simply wanted to fold in on themselves.
Crying never solved anything, Dad had always claimed, so be strong and take control over your emotions.
It is what it is, Mom had declared the last time I’d had her arms around me at age seven when I’d buried my puppy that had been hit by a car.
One final tear had escaped my eye that day, and I’d been nothing but stoic and proper since then, which pleased both my parents.
A hiccupped sob sounded in the night, and I held my breath, straining my ears in the darkness.
Another soft cry turned my focus back toward the cemetery, and I slowly pedaled forward, my tires near silent on the cracked sidewalk beneath them. A break in the trees revealed a wide expanse of open field dotted with dark stones, some tall and monstrous, others short and leaning from age.
The crying grew louder as I approached the entrance. A double gate sat closed and locked, flanked on either side by towering stone pillars.