Page 42 of How to Fake a Haunting

By the time I walked into the kitchen, Callum had made it downstairs. He stood across the island from me, skin ruddy from the blood, his expression somehow both horribly sorrowful and burning with hatred at the same time.

“I don’t know what to ask you about first,” Callum said quietly. There was a dangerous lilt to his voice. “The fact that you apparently had an abortion or that you were standing on our back deck talking to Chris fucking Matheson about it!” His eyes flashed. “Did you cheat on me with him?”

“Jesus Christ, no.” This was not how I wanted to have this conversation.

I’d never wanted to have this conversation at all.

I exhaled slowly, but my whole body was trembling.

“What exactly did you hear?” Had he heard that Adelaide and I had faked the haunting?

Had I gotten within minutes of Callum leaving only to blow everything up?

“Something about bloody handprints. And the abortion. And how you were a crazy bitch and I needed all the luck I could get.”

So he’d heard only the very end of the conversation. Thank Christ. Could I salvage this? Callum knowing about the abortion didn’t negate everything else that had happened.

Then something occurred to me, something so revelatory I felt it physically, spreading from brain to body like medication through the bloodstream.

I’d thought that by preparing the Prince Rupert’s drop in response to the final blackmail note, I’d be spurring Callum to leave before my secret ever came to light.

But what if the abortion had been the real trump card all along?

“I did have an abortion,” I said. My words sounded flat.

Frightening. “Chris Matheson had nothing to do with it. He actually came to see you, but I got confused. Something about how he had a fix for the problem you’d been experiencing and had told him about on the golf course.

” The lie rolled off my tongue, but what was one more in a sea of thousands?

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I had an abortion,” I continued. “Not really. Not after the last four years, how things have been between us. How you’ve been with Beatrix.”

“I cannot believe you.” Callum’s eyes were full of shock and hurt, giving them a strange, depthless quality. “You selfish bitch,” he said. “And you wonder why I drink?” As he spoke, he moved around the island, lessening the distance between us.

“What the hell does that mean?” I stepped away from Callum and gripped the marble countertop. “How the fuck are you going to turn this around on me?”

He laughed, the sound of it piercing my skull and causing me to grip the marble harder.

“I’ve known this house is fucking haunted for the last month, but now I find out my goddamn wife, my supposed partner, went and got a fucking abortion behind my back, killed a baby that was half mine.

It’s like you created a ghost to haunt me.

The ghost of our dead child. If you had told me you wanted an abortion, it might have been different.

But to do it in secret? I will never get over this.

” His voice wavered. “I will never get over what you did to me. What you did to us!”

Something was growing in the air between us, some palpable aura or energy, mist-like but growing denser by the moment.

“What I did?” I screamed back. “Look around you, Callum! I’m hiding Beatrix at my parents’ house after you gave her a concussion and broke her wrist!

I’m playing psychiatrist by day and fucking ghost hunter by night, getting sucked into your veritable lunatic asylum, and this is my fault?

There is no us! There hasn’t been an us in years, and it’s all because of you and your stupid fucking drinking, your fucking immaturity and selfishness! ”

Callum shook his head in some pantomime of disappointment, his eyes bloodshot, a vein in his forehead throbbing beneath the sweat-sheened skin. “You knew I wanted another baby. You knew I did. You did this to punish me.”

“I did this for me!” I screamed. Blood thrummed in my temples as if my skull had been hit with a tuning fork.

“I did this because the last thing I want is another connection to you! I want to sever what’s between you and me, what little is between you and your daughter, and I want to leave.

But you won’t let me. Your parents won’t let me.

I can’t stomach the thought of sharing Beatrix with you and your fucking family.

You think I want to bring another child into the world and have to share them too? ”

Callum took a step toward me, and I shrank back. I was almost up against the stove now. Callum was directly in front of the cabinet. Pour yourself a drink, I commanded. Do what you do best, and pour yourself a fucking drink.

“I told you you’d take Beatrix away from me over my dead body,” Callum growled. “Now you’ve taken away a child of mine that I’ll never even fucking see. Never get to spend time with.”

The aura between us coalesced into something tangible, like the air in the attic.

Immovable. Shifting. Breathing. “You don’t spend time with your daughter,” I spat, struggling to breathe through the stuffiness.

“You don’t deserve her. You don’t deserve any child.

” I sucked in air, feeling like I was choking. “You know what you do deserve?”

Callum sneered and glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t know about what I deserve, but I know what I fucking need.” He pulled the cabinet door open and gripped a pint glass. Holding my gaze, he reached for the straw. “Is this it?” His tone was mocking. “Is this what I deserve, Lainey?”

Blinking through my tears, I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

The air between us was like smoke, but Callum didn’t seem to notice.

He was reaching behind him now, for the freezer.

Forgoing ice, he opened the vodka and poured it straight into the glass.

I thought he’d forgo a straw too, but then he slammed the freezer door shut and reached back into the cabinet.

His fingers grazed the cup, then rose several inches and wound themselves around the straw.

“Is this what I deserve?” he asked again, and despite my anticipation, my growing horror, my rage reignited.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Callum put the straw into his drink. “Say it,” he said. “Say the words. What do I deserve, Lainey? What do you wish would happen to me?”

“You deserve to drown in your cups,” I said, and now the tears spilled from my eyes because I meant it. I felt nothing for the person before me but a ceasing, searing hatred. “You deserve to be alone, to die alone. To have nothing but the pain you have caused me and your daughter.”

Callum nodded. His eyes, too, were wet with tears.

But I wasn’t finished. “I want you to die,” I said, and I was sobbing now, rocked by the bitterness coursing through me, not just for him but for myself, my lack of compassion.

“Not for anything as opportune as insurance money or a clean slate. I want you to die because it would be easier for me and for Beatrix if you’d just . . . fucking . . . disappear.”

The aura between us was swirling now, as if it’d absorbed my rage, his desperation, our mutual pain. He sniffed and laughed a strange, sad laugh, as if, somehow, he knew what was coming. He pinched the flexible portion of the straw.

And bent it.

There was the briefest moment of a pleasant-sounding tinkling, like rain on an aluminum roof, before the tinkling rushed into a crescendo of glass shattering against glass.

The drop evaporated, and the pint glass morphed into a glistening cascade of a waterfall roaring into a plunge pool.

Callum’s hand shot back, and he yelped. A millisecond later, glass showered down onto the kitchen floor, the explosion devolving back into an almost harmonious tinkling.

I understood, now, what Adelaide had intuitively known after hearing Joe and Morgan’s account of the Prince Rupert’s drop, understood why she knew it’d be the turning point in the haunting.

It was both beautiful and terrifying, an explosion otherworldly in its graceful devastation.

My head—and eyes—hurt from the confusion of it.

I’d both seen it and seen nothing at all, too fast and incomprehensible was the whole experience.

The blood, however. I saw the blood, viciously red and shockingly thick, covering Callum’s hand up to his wrist. He howled the way Beatrix might have upon plunging through the deck rail, had she not been rendered unconscious.

At first, I thought the plunk-plunk-plunk was Callum’s blood against the hardwood, or else a portion of the glass shards had somehow remained suspended in the air and were only now falling to the floor.

But that was impossible. And . . . the sound was louder, somehow more ingrained, as if the very walls were speaking.

Clink. Tink. Pop. Clink. Pop. Tiiiiiinkle.

Callum raised his gaze from where he’d been staring at his bloodied hand. Our eyes met, and despite the hatred still radiating from each of us, our simultaneous realization forged a momentary connection.

“The windows,” I said at the same moment Callum shouted, “Get down!”

But it wasn’t just the windows. It was the mirrors.

Every glass surface in the house was popping and tinkling as if it were a frozen pond supporting the weight of one too many skaters.

I had enough time to fold my arms over my head and duck before the glass exploded, one after the other after the other.

The mirror at the other end of the kitchen sent glass shooting outward in every direction.

The sound was like a ninety-mile-per-hour highway wreckage between a glass-lined limousine and a semi.

I thought the silence following the blowout had grown teeth until I realized there were tiny shards of glass in my ears.

Gingerly, I shook them out. Callum had yet to move from where he’d slumped against the refrigerator.

He held his bloody right hand in front of him, the fingers of his left hand wrapped around his wrist. I couldn’t tell how bad it was, couldn’t focus on his injury at all, my brain jumping from one thought to the next, making manic, disorganized connections.

The windows had exploded. The mirrors had exploded. In the exact moment after the Prince Rupert’s drop had broken. There was nothing Adelaide could have possibly done to have instigated something of this magnitude. The words of her last text message wound themselves through my mind:

I think the haunting is real.