Page 55 of You Belong Here

I woke to find Trevor standing at the living room windows, mug in hand, peering out. It looked like he’d aged five years in the last three days. “I think someone’s out there,” he said. “In a car. Watching.”

The police, keeping an eye on us. The circle tightening.

As I joined him at the window, he handed me a mug he’d had waiting on a coffee table coaster for me.

“Do you believe her?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But it doesn’t look good.”

He dragged his hand down his face, pulling at the skin. “I should’ve kept it,” he said. “It could’ve proved something. Fingerprints, maybe.”

I shook my head. “It was in the water. All it would prove is that someone wanted her to take the fall. You were right to get rid of it.”

I opened my phone, checking to see if Delilah had contacted me in the night. There was nothing but her single text letting us both know she was back in the dorm, going to sleep.

I checked my email next.

I had two new messages: one from my parents and the other from FordGroup — an email this time, with an attachment. I held my breath as I opened that first.

There was only one line: I know what you did.

The photo attached, I didn’t understand. It was a picture of the mountain ridge. The series of peaks that were so clearly visible from the road on the way into town, near Maggie’s house. The same view I’d seen on Delilah’s Instagram page with the caption: Here .

As if they wanted me to know they were watching us both.

I peered up to find Trevor looking me over. “You okay?” he asked.

I nodded, then opened my parents’ message—a response to my short note that Adalyn had been found dead.

We were able to get your mother on a red-eye last-minute. I just dropped her off. Here is the ticket info .

There was no note as to whether I was supposed to get her or not. I checked the ticket details. She had already landed in Charlotte, was due on her connection into Richmond by eleven.

“What’s the matter?” Trevor asked.

I looked up and grimaced. “My mother is coming.”

I barely had time to shower and throw on my jeans and button-down from our police meeting days earlier.

I grabbed the keys while Trevor passed me a bagel sandwich he’d made me for the road. “Thank you I love you oh my God,” I said without thinking, racing for the door. And then I turned back. “You’ll take care of her, right?”

He stared straight at me, nodded once. “Of course I will. You know I will, Beckett.” Something in me loosened, relaxed.

I realized it was the only reason I could leave right now. Because I believed him.

The Richmond airport was a two-hour drive out of the mountains toward the coast. It was smaller and commuter-friendly, and I easily found parking before her landing time.

Made it, I texted Trevor, hoping all was okay in the valley. I worried about being this far away. But there was nothing I could really do until the cops came to us with more details.

Trevor texted back: I got a few referrals, making calls now. That was the plan for today. Make sure we protect Delilah. Starting with finding a good lawyer.

Another text from Trevor arrived: I also stripped all evidence I was sleeping in your mother’s bed.

I smiled, then tucked my phone away and headed toward the pickup area.

One short landing delay and a long wait for baggage claim later, my mother emerged, squinting in the midday sun.

She looked exactly like someone who’d been traveling through the night, in purple velour sweatpants and a matching zip-up hoodie.

It was a little hot for that now, but by the time we made it back to the mountains, she’d probably be perfectly comfortable.

“Mom,” I called, raising my arm.

She veered my way, pulling a large suitcase behind her as if coming home for good. I opened the trunk of my car and took the luggage from her while she stood there, wide-eyed, disoriented.

“I didn’t know you were coming until I landed,” she said, motioning to her phone. She blinked rapidly, as if I were an apparition.

“Well, I didn’t get Dad’s email until this morning. So it was a little last-minute.” I was glad she had at least gotten my text. I hadn’t been sure her cell would even be back online when she landed in the States. It seemed like they’d shut everything down for the international trip.

We started driving in silence. I didn’t know where to start. How was your flight? I think Adalyn Vale was staying in your house while you were gone.

“Beckett,” she said after we merged onto the highway heading west, “tell me. Tell me what’s been going on.”

I told her more in the course of thirty minutes than I had in the last five years.

About the dropped call that had brought me back to her house in the middle of the night.

Delilah lost, then showing up in her basement.

The evidence that someone else had been staying in her house.

And Adalyn Vale turning up dead on campus.

Then I told her more: about the police and how they didn’t seem to believe Delilah’s story. And then, as the first set of mountain ridges came into view in the distance, I told her about the money I’d found in Adalyn’s things.

“Okay,” she said very calmly, resting her head on the back of her seat like she was about to take a quick nap. “Okay.”

“That’s it ?” I said, twisting in my seat. She’d flown across a continent through the night to tell me everything was okay ?

She gestured toward the road like I was about to drive us both off it. “This isn’t the time, Beckett.”

“It’s not the—” I cut the wheel at a sign for a rest area, picnic tables at an empty overlook. I slammed on the brakes, jerking us to a stop in a diagonal parking spot. “It is very much the time, Mom. In fact, I can think of no better time.”

“This isn’t helping right now,” she said. “Let’s get home first and we can talk there.”

“There’s a police vehicle currently stationed outside your house, Mom.

So I’d rather talk now, if you don’t mind.

” My hands shook as I twisted around for my purse in the backseat.

I reached inside and pulled out the silver chain, the skeleton key dangling between us in the car.

“I found this in the house,” I said. “I think Dad hid it and replaced it with a fake in the archive room.”

Her face paled, and her hand went to her chest. “Where did you get that?” she asked. For the first time, I seemed to have rattled her.

“The space under the dumbwaiter,” I said. “It was partially buried. I have no idea how it ended up there. But it seemed like it had been there for a very long time.”

She stared at the key, then threw open the car door and climbed outside, like she was desperate for air.

I followed her to the edge of the overlook, where a long, hazy mountain ridge was visible in the distance. Maybe ours, maybe not.

“It wasn’t your father,” she said, turning to face me. Begging me to see it, asking me to understand without her going any further.

“Tell me,” I said as a series of cars whizzed around the bend behind us.

“There was a fire. We heard the sirens,” she said, looking out to the mountains instead of at me.

“We didn’t know where you were, and I had this terrible feeling.

” She swallowed, hand to her throat. “I was in a panic. I threw on your dad’s boots at the front door.

” Men’s size-ten boots, footsteps in the snow .

I swallowed, the lump in my throat practically burning. “What did you do?”

The wind blew through her short hair, and she finally looked me in the eye.

“I ran toward campus. And there she was outside the gates, just standing at the edge of the road, like she was in a daze. She had a bag with her. She’d packed.

” My mother shook her head. “I had to get close before she even seemed to notice me. Close enough for me to see she had the key hanging around her neck. She smelled of smoke. Reeked of it. And I knew. I knew something terrible had happened.”

And it was. Terrible. Absolutely horrific. The worst thing I could imagine.

“She took the key. I couldn’t get back in—” I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. What if I’d said this years ago, decades ago. Confessed her sins and mine in the process?

My mother stared back, like she’d been waiting for this moment all along.

I’d emerged from the tunnels at Beckett Hall and had to make my way back through the woods to home base on foot. “Did she tell you what happened?”

“She said she’d lit a torch too close to the building. It brushed the wood, and it went up so fast. I couldn’t tell whether she meant to. She seemed shocked that she’d done it, discovering what she was capable of.”

That’s what everyone said after. That she’d watched it burn, eyes reflecting the flames. The power of what she had done seeping through her.

“She said she was in trouble. I brought her back to the house.”

“Why did you help her?”

“Why do you think?” she asked, leading me to the right answer—as if afraid to say it herself.

A truck barreled around the curve, brakes squealing before catching traction, drawing our attention.

“She held up that key. Said you got it for her. Said there were people down there, and you locked the other way out.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t lock a door.” But that was semantics. I’d closed it, and in the end, that was the same thing. I shook my head, walking back the lie. “I didn’t know what she was doing until it was too late.”

“I wanted to kill her,” my mother said. Her voice shook. “For the first time, I understood the base impulse. That desperate desire. I wanted her dead.”

But it was different to want than to do.

“I told her to change in the basement, to leave the clothes in the dumbwaiter, I’d take care of them later.

And when everyone was searching the woods for her, I drove her out of the mountains, north.

She used a phone at a roadside restaurant to call her father’s work.

She told me he was coming. And that was the last I saw of her. ”

I waited for her to say more, but she’d stopped. Apparently that was the end of the story.

“But that was nearly twenty years ago,” I said.

“I really thought I’d never see her again,” she said, frowning. “So much time had passed. And then five years ago, she came back.”

Five years ago. The police had mentioned this. “Her parents died.”

She nodded. “She couldn’t get her inheritance. Couldn’t get any more money. Couldn’t make enough on her own as a person with no history. They hadn’t planned for it, hadn’t left her a way to access their funds. Unless she went back to her old life.”

“She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.”

Her eyes widened. “It doesn’t matter if she would or not. The threat was out there.”

Her old life meant the police. Meant the truth coming out. Meant me.

“She had a license but not a passport. Her world had limits, borders. But her parents found a way to support her. She had managed for years. And then it was gone. So now we pay her as much as we can. Support her like a child. Had to sell some things so that we didn’t lose the house.”

“Dad was selling his collection.” I tracked the timing. “He got fired over it?”

“That first year, yes. We needed cash quick and maybe didn’t do things carefully enough. The fact that his items had been part of an exhibit gave everything legitimacy.” She sighed. “The college said it put them in a tough spot. That he had overstepped for his own financial gain.”

And then, without his job, they were really in a tough spot. Had to mortgage the house. Take extra work wherever they could.

“The money in the house, that was from you?” I asked.

She nodded. “Every fall, she comes for the money.”

“You knew she was coming?” I asked, horrified. They could’ve prepared me. Could’ve warned me.

“We didn’t know when . We have no way to contact her. No phone, no email. Our only stipulation was that she couldn’t come in the summer, when Delilah might be there, visiting. It was too close. We agreed on the fall. We never know when, but she always shows up.”

As inevitable as the howling after a long stillness, I thought.

“We had no way to tell her we’d be away. We left the money for her. Knew she would find her way inside.”

It was why my parents needed me gone before they left for their trip. They were preparing for her arrival. And it was the reason they didn’t want me at the house when I emailed them about the missing key. “You knew she was there when I asked you about the spare key.”

“I worried she was there,” she corrected.

“The neighbors saw the lights on,” I said. “She was staying this time. I don’t understand what she wanted other than the money.”

She must’ve wanted her life back. Decided that she’d served enough time. She must’ve been in town, watching, planning. She might’ve escaped, but how free was she, really? How free were any of us from the past?

“Should we go now?” my mother asked, and I almost laughed.

I started walking back to the car. “Sure, we should go,” I said, and then, since we were putting it all on the table, “Someone’s been sending me notes.

In my email. To my phone. Ever since I dropped off Delilah.

The first said Welcome Home. ” Even now, it sent a wave of nausea through my body.

“But they’ve gotten worse. More specific. Like they want me to know they know.”

“Could it have been Adalyn?” she asked, as I opened the car door.

“I thought that at first,” I said, slipping inside. “But the messages keep coming.”

We continued the drive in silence, stuck in our own thoughts.

Whoever killed Adalyn might’ve had the key to my parents’ house, might’ve figured out where she’d been staying. By the time I’d asked my parents about the spare key, Adalyn was dead.

“One more thing,” I said when we finally pulled up to the house. “I forgot to mention. Trevor’s here.”