Page 23 of House of Hearts

Sadie tenses at the name, her knuckles burning white against her thighs.

“All of us. We spent all summer searching this godforsaken campus and couldn’t find him.

We’ve resorted to doing weekly séances in some of his most frequented locations.

If he really is…d-dead, he’d likely want to linger in an area that meant something to him.

We’re planning on trying another one here tomorrow. ”

My brain balks at the idea of a Hasbro Ouija board, but I have to remind myself that logic’s been thrown out the window. We’re no longer in my domain. “Got it.”

“Now, if you don’t mind, let’s not waste any more time,” Sadie says tartly, her sour attitude a clever disguise for her watering eyes. She beckons me with a stern finger. “Violet, if you’d join me over here.”

I throw one last fleeting look at Birdie before trudging toward my fate. Sadie sits primly in the corner of the room with a collection of old boxes and photos around her. She waits until everyone’s occupied to whisper to me out of earshot. “Can I trust you not to run off again?”

My fists waver against my sides. “That was—”

She shuts me up before I can finish. “I don’t care about your excuses. I care about my brother. Don’t make me repeat myself again. Can I trust you?”

I nod.

She squints like she doesn’t buy it but relents anyway.

“Okay, then, let’s get to work.” God only knows how long we spend wading through research in near-total silence.

The only times Sadie opens her mouth are when she’s sliding something over to show me, and even then it’s mainly her nail doing the talking.

This time, it’s not a photograph she’s tapping on but a rather complicated family tree.

“Ernest Hart only had two daughters, so in a sense, the academy was his way of carrying on his name.” I follow the almond tip of her fingernail from Ernest down to his two daughters.

“We all know what happened to Anastasia’s branch…

and as for Helen, she ceased to be a Hart the day she married Oleander. ”

Beneath her name, there’s a bevy of children and grandchildren, and we follow the path from eldest child to eldest child until we make it to Meredith Lockwell-Kirkland.

“I didn’t know your name was hyphenated.”

Sadie shrugs. “?‘Sadie Lockwell’ sounds a lot better than ‘Sadie Lockwell-Kirkland,’ don’t you think? Plus, my mom says his name is a waste of space on the birth certificate.”

I blink down at Arthur Kirkland and his alleged waste-of-space name. “Erm, is he your mother’s…?”

“Soulmate?” Sadie scoffs. “Hell no. They tolerate each other, but they’re not in love by any stretch of the imagination.

Her soulmate is dead. My dad was actually in the Cards when it happened”—“it” carrying the implied weight of supernatural murder—“and marrying Mom was his consolation prize for not breaking the curse…or his punishment, depending on who you ask.”

We move past her mother’s marital problems to photos of the school’s construction (“Tripp thought it might be like the Winchester Mystery House”) and, finally, the maze itself.

“It was relatively common to build elaborate graves before people died, though it had to have been unsettling to play in your own future cemetery as a child,” Sadie says, pointing at the black-and-white images of standing mausoleums. A whole family of graves waiting to swallow up the dead: Ernest, Adaline, Anastasia, and Helen.

“Oleander and the others are buried in a separate plot. I don’t think anyone would have blamed Helen if she decided to be buried alongside him, but she chose to honor her late parents’ wishes. Plus, she also felt guilty, I’m sure.”

I pick at the skin around my thumb. “Speaking of Oleander…I saw his face in the boathouse. Was he a student here? Is that how this all started?”

She nods and digs through her stack of papers before retrieving a student acceptance form for him.

“Hart Academy had recently made the shift toward becoming coeducational—one of the first boarding schools nationwide to do so—which meant he was a new student alongside Helen and Anastasia. According to Oleander’s entrance interview, he’d lost someone close to him and needed a change of scenery.

Plus, he was amazing at rowing, and Ernest Hart wanted to send their team to State, so he was an instant transfer for junior year. ”

I hum at that. “And he immediately decided to start dating the Headmaster’s daughters? Plural?”

“It started with Ana, singular. A lot of guys on campus would’ve gouged out their eyes instead of looking at her.

Not that she wasn’t pretty, but she was the baby of the family, and breaking her heart was a surefire way of getting on the Headmaster’s shit list. He met her in the boathouse, and she shoved this first letter in his hand the next time she saw him. ”

She passes me a stack of yellowed papers in a protective clear sleeve. I’m delicate with them as I lift the pages closer.

Dearest stranger,

My father says I should not engage the men at this academy, but you make it hard to abide by the rules.

I hope you don’t think of me as a flirt for this letter.

I promise I’m not so vain that I am only enamored by your appearance (though I must confess you cut a rather striking figure whilst on the rowing team).

More than that, I am besotted by your gentle-hearted ways.

What was perhaps a stray moment for you has illuminated my entire week.

You were kind enough to help me into one of these marvelous swan boats.

Not only that, but you called me beautiful, which I must admit I do not hear often.

When many others ran with their tail between their legs at my father’s behest, you did not.

What good is a headmaster for a father if he acts more in line with a prison warden?

Am I not a soon-to-be marriageable woman?

But you probably aren’t interested in my familial troubles.

You must be wondering as to the purpose of this letter.

Perhaps it is untraditional for a girl to speak her mind so freely, but I have always been one to follow my heart.

I have grown rather fond of you and I would be more than delighted if you would respond to my correspondence with your name. How else might I daydream without one?

Yours if you wish it to be so, Anastasia Hart

PS: If you so desire, toss your response over the locked gate of the hedge maze. Only I have the key to retrieve it.

It almost feels too intimate for me to read. Nothing is overly sensational—what was she going to do, show him her ankle?—but to have one’s heart laid bare for people to see over a hundred years later? I cringe at the thought of it.

“Did he respond?”

“Yeah, right away, actually. For a while there, the two seemed to hit it off, which I’m guessing made the betrayal sting even worse.”

I take the next sheet, and while it’s significantly shorter than hers, it’s ten times more gag inducing.

Dearest Anastasia,

Perhaps your father was right in some regard. You are enchanting enough to make the male populace at Hart lose their heads. I confess that my own research lay neglected in the wake of your arrival into my life. There is no sweeter subject than you. So, tell me, Ana, when might I study you again?

A scholar of the heart, O

“That was brutal,” I groan, letting the letter fall back with the rest. “Who knew being an incorrigible flirt runs in the family?”

“I heard that,” Calvin quips from his end of the room at the same time Ash mumbles the Latin “incorrigibilis.”

“Good. You were meant to,” I snap before looking back at the paper. “How could anyone fall for that?”

Sadie shrugs. “She was pretty sheltered most of her life and also a die-hard romantic. I’m sure she thought it was charming.”

“Plenty of people find me charming.”

“No one’s talking about you anymore, Calvin.”

He grumbles to himself but mercifully shuts up for the remainder of the meeting.

The next time I hear from him, it’s when he’s standing up and cracking his knuckles.

“I’m going to call it for today. I have a Curtis audition I need to practice for—Mom’s been grilling me on it.

If you hear screaming and crying in the other room, it’s me. ”

The clock in the corner says it’s five past curfew, but I know one flash of my card will have the RA turning a blind eye when I get back.

It feels like the ultimate hall pass, so much so that I cornered Calvin in the cafeteria earlier to hammer out the specifics.

Surely there had to be some things off-limits, right?

“How is it that we can fling our card around and do whatever the hell we want, no consequences?” I questioned, my voice a hushed murmur in the lunch line.

He’d placed a waxed apple on his tray and thrown a shrug back at me.

“When your mom’s the headmistress, people have a habit of looking the other way.

She’s pulled some heavy strings in the background to keep us running and functional.

Besides,” he continued, sinking his teeth into the red skin and swallowing down a chunk.

His voice lowered to a haughty whisper. “Who gives a shit about detention when you’re fighting a literal ghost? ”

As much as I hate being a smug card-waver like the rest of them, I can’t leave all this information behind now. Like I’m in some sort of waking dream, I worry that the instant reality comes ringing, all this will fade away.

I’m clearly the only one in the room with that sentiment because the rest of them gradually leave one by one.

Tripp yawns and dismisses himself for the night with a two-finger salute; Mallory leaves immediately after; Oliver winces at his phone screen as he leaves at the several missed FaceTime attempts from Amber.

Birdie stands up next, and I prepare for some excuse to leave her lips, but instead of heading for the door, she walks our way.