Page 4 of You Belong Here

“Look who’s here!” The door to the house swung open under the porch light, screen door balanced on my father’s hip.

He dressed like he always did, no matter the season: khaki pants, checkered button-down tucked in, loose gold watch.

My mother hovered just behind him, her close-cropped, stylish brown hair making her look younger than her seventy-plus years, while my father’s receding hairline and hunched posture had the opposite effect.

Delilah raced up the porch steps of the old Victorian, a quick pitter-patter on the wood floorboards. Sometimes she seemed like an ethereal figment I had created from air, from nothing, gliding effortlessly through a space.

“Hello, dear,” my mother said as she reached up to hug Delilah. And then to me: “We already ate. I didn’t know how late you would be.”

“I sent you a text,” Delilah said. “We were stuck in traffic.”

“You need to call, ” my mother said, looking at me instead of her.

I could never imagine her reprimanding my daughter.

And then she frowned at my father. “Someone probably needs to reset the Wi-Fi.” Which was apparently as close as I’d get to an apology.

Here in the valley, text messages didn’t always come through if you weren’t connected to a local wireless network.

“Well, come in, come in,” my father said. “We’ll warm up the food in a minute.” I could already smell the lasagna, his specialty, the heat from the kitchen permeating the downstairs.

“Let me bring in Delilah’s things,” I said, gesturing back to the car at the curb. “She’s got half her life in there.”

“Oh, please,” my mother said. “Like anyone’s going to break into your car here.” She shook her head once. “You’ve lived in a city for too long.”

As if the isolation here somehow inoculated them from crime.

I ignored her and grabbed our backpacks, electronics, and overnight bag, handing Delilah her purple fluff pillow that she carried in front of her like a stuffed animal.

I often felt like Delilah had grown up more slowly than I had, a member of the post-Covid generation, where the rules seemed more important, the consequences more direct. There was no carefree game about their adolescence, as there had been in ours.

“What happened to the house down the street?” Delilah asked, pulling the pillow to her chest, with her oversize khaki backpack hitched on one shoulder. She tipped her head toward the darkening lane.

“Oh,” my father said, following our gaze. “It burned down.” He scratched at the side of his white beard like he’d forgotten. Ancient history.

But I felt my shoulders tense, the evening splinter. A gateway opening up between the present and the past. The crunch of fresh snow. Flames rising over the treetops. The scent of smoke carrying on the wind—

“When?” I asked. The dumpster was still on site, and I was sure the school wasn’t thrilled with the optics during move-in.

“Oh,” he said, shifting slowly on his feet. “Maybe a week ago?”

“Two,” my mother corrected.

This was a hallmark of my father’s perception. All past was the past. Whether a week or a decade. The moment it was behind us, it became something to study.

I felt my mother’s steady gaze on me before her eyes drifted to the side. “Happened in the middle of the night, when no one was home,” she added, as if she could read the tension in my demeanor and needed to clarify. “It was between renters. Old wiring, they said.”

An accident. An old home.

No deaths. No locked doors. No accusations. No mystery.

“Okay, come in, come in,” she said, beckoning. “Don’t stare.”

I trailed Delilah inside, trying, as my mother had requested, not to stare.

The homes on this block had all been built in a much more distant past, and ours was no exception.

It was full of quirks and secrets, from the hexagonal front porch to the kitchen dumbwaiter and the attic door that opened beside my bathroom sink upstairs.

It was the type of place a child would love exploring—and Delilah always had.

But there was a fine line between run-down and charming, old and historic, and we were currently walking that line.

The trinkets from my father’s trips had taken over the space, dust settling in the remaining gaps on the mantel.

The floorboards popped on the narrow staircase, and the thin windows shook in the howling wind.

The old radiators near the baseboards had to work double time to keep up and suddenly seemed like a fire hazard.

Unlike most of their original neighbors, they’d held on to the property since my childhood. There had been no renovations, no fast sell in a market high. They owned it outright, which they claimed allowed them to spend their retirement however they pleased.

But now my parents’ luggage was cluttering the foyer, adding to the sense of claustrophobia.

They were leaving soon for my father’s new assignment, a guest professor role for a semester abroad in Peru.

Neither of my parents was truly suited for retirement.

They guest-lectured, and wrote papers, and accompanied student groups on excursions.

My mother said they had to seize the opportunities while they still could—as if they could hear a clock ticking down.

They had postponed the start of their trip to see Delilah into college.

Though I’d told them they didn’t need to be here for move-in, my mother had scoffed.

My only granddaughter? Of course she would be here.

But now I felt the luggage was a stark reminder of the imposition.

As if she wanted me to see their sacrifice.

Beside their bags were several brown boxes marked Fragile .

“I don’t think the bottom of an airplane is the safest place for these,” I said, frowning.

“I know that,” my mother said, crossing her arms. “They’ll be our carry-ons.”

I raised an eyebrow at Delilah. “And here I thought you had overpacked.”

Delilah and I ate dinner at the circular kitchen table with both of them hovering over us, watching like we were a foreign specimen.

They cleaned the kitchen around us, wiping down the counters, refilling Delilah’s cup whenever it got half empty.

When I was a teenager, I often felt that I was in the center of a snow globe, visible from all angles.

My dad was a professor of anthropology, my mother of psychology, and their attention managed to feel somehow too close and too aloof at the same time.

My father, seeing things from a remove—he’d said once that college itself was nothing but a huge social experiment—while my mother always seemed to be peering deeply into my psyche.

I grew to believe that she could sense a lie as easily as the truth.

It had taught me to be both clever and closed.

Careful, always, to mask my thoughts, if I wanted to keep them for myself.

“Oh, we ran into Maggie,” my father said, dipping into the past again. “She says hi.” Which I doubted. My father never seemed to notice that we’d drifted apart after high school. “And she says good luck to you, ” my father said, patting Delilah on the head as he passed behind her.

Delilah’s gaze trailed after him. “I have no idea who you’re talking about,” she said.

“Your mom’s old friend. You’ve met her once or twice,” he said, squinting out the window over the sink.

“We dropped off a baby gift,” my mother added, like she was the keeper of his memories. “It was a while ago, but you were here visiting us.”

This was the first I had heard about Delilah meeting Maggie. I knew she’d had twins—my parents kept their annual holiday card on the fridge just below ours—but that must’ve been five or six years ago now.

“How’s your work going?” my mother asked with a tilt of her head.

My mother always seemed confused that I’d managed to make a career as a ghostwriter.

But it played to my strengths—I could copy any voice, any style, slip into someone else’s story and make it my own.

I took on both fiction and nonfiction projects for all ages and audiences.

And when I was done, I could leave them behind. Nothing to either own or answer for.

“Good,” I said, scraping the last of my lasagna from the plate.

“Busy. I’m almost finished with a big project.

” I’d taken on the last few books in a middle-grade series over the past year, writing under a shared pen name, racing against a string of very tight deadlines.

But the project was coming to an end; my agent was starting to put out feelers for what would come next.

“Marcia Greene was asking when we saw her last,” she said, like my old literature professor was the main reason for the question.

Delilah leaned back in her chair, scrolling through her phone. “Can someone check the Wi-Fi?” she asked. “I can’t log into my school email for tomorrow’s schedule.”

My father sighed, heading for the hall. “I’ll reboot it again.”

“We were shutting things down for the semester,” my mother explained, eyes wide like she was sharing a secret. “I’m not sure if he got the dates right.” She gave Delilah a tight smile. “Sorry about that. As soon as you’re close to campus tomorrow, you’ll be able to log onto their network.”

Delilah’s eyes cut to mine in a moment of pure panic. No Wi-Fi, no texting. No entertainment here but my parents’ outdated over-the-airwaves television.

“Early to bed, I guess,” I teased as she scrunched her nose at me in disgust.

“We made up the futon in your father’s office,” my mother said, either not catching or ignoring the joke. “It’s up to you who sleeps where.”

The side of Delilah’s mouth quirked up. She held out her fist, preparing for a round of rock-paper-scissors.

“Go ahead,” I said. “You might as well have a real room to yourself for the last time in a while.”