Chương 55: “What June Understands”

She did not tell Lauren that day. She went to school. She sat through her lessons. She ate her lunch in the library with Bilal, who was working through a book three levels above his reading group and needed someone to help with the hard words, and she helped him with the hard words and she thought about what Vorrath had written. Not mine. She had grown up in a house with a cold closet. She had left things in the dark since she was six.

She had felt the house around her the way you feel a presence in a room, the feeling of not being alone that she had learned to distinguish from the general feeling and before she had words for either. She had dreamed, sometimes, of long stone corridors and a fire at the bottom of everything. She had thought they were just dreams.

She came home from school and she sat at the kitchen table and she told Lauren everything while Cecile made tea and Gerald settled into the wall behind her head the way he did when he was listening. Lauren read the letter. Her face did the thing it did, the fury managed into stillness, the calm. She put it face-down.

"Thirty days," she said.

"Vorrath says he needs more floors," June said.

"But not his. He wrote not mine." The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Lauren and Cecile looked at each other.

"The house," Cecile said. Lauren was quiet for a moment.

"The house."

"It's not just a house," Cecile said.

"It hasn't been just a house for a very long time. My grandmother's notes—" She stopped. Started again.

"There are things written in the walls of this house. Not by us. Things that were here before us. Before the family that was here before us." She looked at Vorrath on the windowsill.

"Things that were here when he was first dormant. When he first went under." The kitchen was very quiet. Vorrath glowed once.

"He knew," June said.

"He's always known."

"Known what?" Lauren asked. June looked at him. He wrote on the water glass, slowly, one word at a time, because this was one of the things that was important to get right. The house is not built on top of me. I am built underneath it. I did not choose this street. I chose this family. The house grew around the choosing. They read it. All three of them. Cecile's hand went to her mouth. Lauren looked at the counter, at the stack of letters that was smaller now, at the window, at the ordinary street outside.

June looked at him for a long time.

"For how long?" she said. He wrote: longer than the house. longer than the street. I was dormant. But I was here. She nodded. Just that. The way she always nodded when something was too large for an immediate response. Then she said: "So when I reached into the closet—" One glow.

"You'd been waiting." He had not thought of it as waiting. He had been dormant, sealed, far below anything. But she was not wrong. Whatever he had been doing down there in the long dark, it had ended when her hand found his shard. One glow. Yes. She sat with that.

"Okay," she said finally, in the voice that meant she had arrived somewhere.

"So this is our house. Not just ours. Yours too." She looked at the floor, through the floor, through all thirty-one floors to the hearth at the bottom.

"So we fight for it."