Page 8 of You Belong Here

My shoulders tensed. Wasn’t that a big part of my fear here?

Anyone could see that Delilah belonged to me.

Instead of my traits dulling, blending with Trevor’s fairer features, it was like each of mine had only grown stronger in her.

Hair, a richer shade of brown. Eyes, a deeper blue.

Her smile wider, cheekbones sharper, limbs longer.

I could even see myself in her expressions, slightly exaggerated but there all the same.

“This is Bryce,” Violet said, gesturing to the lanky teenager towering over her, dark hair falling haphazardly in his eyes, shoulders hunched forward like he was trying to go unnoticed at well over six feet tall.

Bryce, I assumed, took after his father.

“Delilah,” my daughter answered, shaking hands with both Violet and her son.

“I can’t believe it,” Violet said. “Both of our kids in the same school. Like old times!”

Which wasn’t entirely true. Violet had graduated before I’d started high school, and she’d never been a student at Wyatt College that I knew of.

“I didn’t know you had a son,” I said. I tried to remember anything I’d heard about Violet in the years since high school, but I came up blank.

“I’d heard you had a kid,” she continued in a way that sent a chill down my spine as I thought of how my name had continued to circle through town even after I’d left. “I just didn’t know she was starting college already. And coming here! What a surprise.”

I could say the same about her. Violet Harvey had grown up in Wyatt Valley, but it was unusual for locals to also attend college here. There was a divide in the town; it was hard to truly exist as a member of both. Most people didn’t want to try.

Besides, not many families chose to fork over the price tag for private tuition to live exactly where they’d always lived. I, with my two professor parents, named after the building at the heart of the campus, had the privilege of a free ride.

“Well, you know how this place can be,” Violet said, and I nodded. Though we probably had opposing views on that now.

Our tour guide had moved on from the bell tower, and we all rushed to catch up.

We joined late as she was speaking of the famed traditions of the college.

She pointed in the direction of the fountain at center campus where students tossed offerings for luck before finals.

She paused in front of the marble steps to nowhere that reminded me of the ruins of the Athens Acropolis, and relayed their history as the bones left behind from the original footprint of campus.

I felt Violet lean over. “I guess they don’t highlight how many people end up in the infirmary each year from these steps.”

“Any of the steps, really,” I added. How many kids had broken a bone each year running down from upper campus, inebriated?

“Or the heart attack on parents’ weekend last year,” she said, and I widened my eyes in surprise. “Had to be airlifted,” she whispered.

The tour guide took a step up the marble so she was visible to the semicircle around her. “Our favorite tradition is to decorate these steps in the spring…”

I felt Violet lean even closer. “ That’s their favorite tradition now?” she said under her breath with a laugh.

I cut my eyes to the side, but she was staring straight ahead.

But I knew exactly what she meant. Our favorite tradition had officially died twenty years ago—abruptly halted and banned by the school after the town’s biggest tragedy.

“You know what they say now at the first howling?” Violet said as we headed toward Beckett Hall, ending the tour.

I didn’t answer, heard only the sound of air rushing in and out of my ears.

Violet grinned, leaned closer, so I could feel the words against the side of my cheek. “They say it’s Adalyn.”

She pulled back and smiled at me—like she was telling ghost stories around a campfire, waiting to gauge my reaction.

For all the change to her outer appearance, the old Violet I remembered was still there. Sharp and funny, just as long as it wasn’t at your expense. Violet Harvey had always suffered no fools.

“So nice catching up, Violet,” I said, one hand on Delilah’s elbow, guiding her away. “I think it’s our turn to check in.”

This was what I had wanted to explain to Delilah about the town. The way no one had forgotten. The way a simple comment could carry layers of history underneath.

The way I could never be sure whether the implication was meant for me.

Before that final, fateful howling, the scandals on campus rarely spilled over to the town itself.

There was the series of hazing incidents that led to the Wyatt fraternities and sororities shutting down.

Faculty campaigned to get a president booted.

There had been embezzling of athletic funds, traced back to that same president, who was sacked but somehow not charged, which thankfully prevented it from becoming national news.

That was the trick, really, to a place like this. Keep the dirt to the bubble. Control the narrative.

But my senior year, that became impossible. Two young men from town were dead, on campus property. Their names were Charlie Rivers and Micah White. They were twenty-four years old. And a Wyatt College student had allegedly set the fire that killed them.

Adalyn Vale had a soft, rounded face, cheeks that pressed upward when she smiled, red in the cold.

Hair she’d tie into a pair of blond braids under a winter hat, so that from a distance she could pass for a child.

Maybe that’s why it was so hard to believe the witness reports at first. Maybe that’s why people were so intrigued by her crime.

Eventually the police tracked her movements across campus, out the gates, to the intersection of College Lane. And that was the last concrete trace of Adalyn’s existence.

All that remained were two sets of footprints in the snow: hers and a men’s size-ten winter boots. And the wind ultimately erased even that evidence.

The college settled in a civil suit brought by the victims’ families—though they tried at first to fight it. The men were not their students. They’d been trespassing; the tunnels were off limits; they must’ve sneaked inside.

I’d been long gone by the time it was all settled, but I’d kept up with it all online. And I’d been there for the worst of it: the smoke in the sky, flames rising over the trees; fire engine sirens in the night and the coroner’s van by dawn.

Their deaths had exacerbated every tension, every slight, between the town and the school. Every fight over a property line expansion; every noise ordinance complaint and trespassing citation. Every allocation of funds and diversion of resources.

It didn’t matter that the main suspect had vanished.

Someone had to pay.