Page 103 of The New Couple in 5B

Then another set of footfalls approaches. Slowly.

I scramble to my feet, breathless with fear, adrenaline still pulsing.

Maybe I’m next, whoever killed Dana, or pushed Xavier, right around the corner.

Trapped, I prepare to fight whoever has come down here after me. I won’t go easily or without doing some damage.

I reach for my cell phone. No signal. Of course.

I hammer out a text to Detective Crowe, hope it will send once it reaches a place where there’s service, even if I never do.

I’m in trouble. Trapped in the basement of the Church of the Ascension on Madison Avenue. Dana, then Xavier, wanted to tell me something. Now they’re dead. I think I’m next. Abi is a liar. Xavier and Dana knew each other; check her Instagram feed. My husband—

But I don’t finish because whoever is down here with me is turning the corner. I hit Send.

I wait, my breath thick.

But the woman who comes into view is small, wearing an oversize coat and Converse sneakers. Her golden curls and upturned nose, blushed cheeks, make her look like a doll. For a moment, I feel like I’m imagining her, conjuring her.

When she speaks, her Ozarks accent is twangy, pure country. And the sound of it brings me right back to the childhood bedroom we shared, the smell of my mother’s kitchen, the whispering willow in the yard. Another ghost? A vision? A memory?

No.

“Hey,” my sister, Sarah, says with a sad smile. She’s so changed, and yet exactly the same. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

thirty-two

“What are you doing here?” I ask, wondering again if she’s here at all or if I’ve just gone full-tilt and this is it, time to get carted off to the place they take you when reality departs.

She still looks like a girl, not a married woman carrying a child. It’s been years since I’ve seen my sister, but it might as well be minutes. The urge to run and take her into my arms is powerful, almost irresistible, but I keep my distance. My family is quicksand; get too close and they pull you under.

She shakes her head of golden curls. “I dreamed that you were in trouble.”

“So what? You just got on a bus and came here—after all this time?”

She looks down at her feet, like maybe she’s not sure why she came, either. “I dreamed that you needed me.”

“You’re pregnant. You left your home and your husband, came to a city you’ve never visited, because of a dream.”

She gives me that stare-down she’s perfected since childhood; it radiates a surprising mettle, a knowledge of her own rightness. Just like our father.

“Daddy said it was time one of us came looking,” she says, jutting out her chin.

“That you couldn’t run forever. That you need to remember who you are. Whoweare. I am here to bring you home.”

Her accent, so sharp and twangy on the vowels, the sound of my childhood and something I’ve worked hard to lose. It felt to me like my family, that life, was so far away. But she’s crossed the distance and I am pulled back, a rip current in my life.

“That’s—ridiculous,” I say. There’s that familiar lash of anger, of arguing with someone who won’t hear reason.

“No.” I pull back my shoulders, stand up taller. Organ music drifts down from upstairs. “I’m fine.”

“Really.”

Sisters. How they know your heart and your secrets, all the masks you put on to make yourself braver. Time apart doesn’t diminish the bond, even if you want it to.

“How did you find me here?” My voice is sharp, angry. Her face wrinkles with hurt, but then she straightens up taller, too. We come from a family of strong and powerful women who don’t back down.

“I’ve been standing outside that fancy building you live in now, waiting. I followed when everyone came walking here.”