The House Sitter

Chapter 14 — The Memory

She lied. The lie came out smooth and fast, the way lies do when your life depends on them: couldn’t sleep, looking for a book, sorry, I’ll go back to bed. Richard watched her for a long moment — she could feel him weighing it — and then he nodded, stepped aside, and let her pass. She felt his eyes on her back all the way up the stairs.

In her room, with the door locked, she opened the photos on her phone and stared at them until her eyes burned.

Placed with the Torres family.

She thought about calling her mother. Her thumb actually hovered over the contact — Mom, with the little heart emoji — and she imagined the conversation: Hey, Mom, quick question, was I adopted out of a car wreck? Did my birth parents fake my death? She set the phone down. What would she even be asking for? Permission to stop believing her own life?

She slept, finally, sometime before dawn. And the dream came — the dream she’d been having for weeks, the one she’d dismissed as stress, as the old house creaking into her subconscious.

Only now it wasn’t a dream.

Screeching brakes. Her mother’s scream — a sound like the world tearing in half. Glass everywhere, glittering, falling like rain. The smell of gasoline and her father’s cologne. Pain, white-hot, in her left knee. Someone shouting her name — Grace, Grace, stay with me — and small hands, her small hands, reaching for a juice box rolling across the back seat.

Then white. Hospital white. A ceiling of acoustic tiles with one brown water stain shaped like a rabbit. A nurse’s face leaning close, kind and exhausted: “Shh, honey. It’s okay. You’re okay now.”

And behind the nurse, another woman — dark hair, smelling of oranges — bending over the bed, taking her small hand in both of hers. “Hi, sweetheart,” the woman whispered, crying and smiling at the same time. “Hi, baby. I’m here.”

The nurse, to the woman: “Take your time. And remember what we talked about — let her come to you.”

And the nurse, to her — to the seven-year-old in the bed — smoothing the blanket with gentle hands: “It’s all right, honey. Your new mommy’s here.”

The dark-haired woman sat on the edge of the bed, careful of the tubes, and took the small hand in both of hers. Her hands were warm. “Hi, sweetheart,” she whispered, crying and smiling at the same time. “Hi, baby. I’m here. You’re safe now.”

“Where’s my—” the little girl started, and the woman’s face did something complicated, and the nurse stepped in smoothly: “Let’s not worry about that right now. Let’s get you better first.”

Later — days later, or weeks, time moved like honey in the hospital — there was a car ride, the woman’s arm around her in the back seat, the orange smell of her sweater. A house with yellow walls. A bedroom with a quilt covered in stars. A dog with enormous ears who slept on her feet the first night and every night after. “This is home now,” the woman said, tucking the quilt under her chin. “You’re home.”

Maya woke with her face wet and her left knee throbbing — the knee with the scar. The scar she’d always said came from a bicycle accident when she was nine. She sat up in the dark and pulled back the blanket and stared at it: a pale, jagged line, three inches long, just below the kneecap.

She remembered the dashboard. She remembered the blood. She remembered the nurse saying “hold still, sweetheart, hold still,” and the needle, and the orange smell.

Her whole body went cold.

In the bathroom, she gripped the edge of the sink and stared at herself in the mirror — twenty-four years old, architecture student, broke, ordinary — and tried to find the seam. Tried to find the place where Maya Torres ended and someone else began.

There was no seam. There was only a blank: seven years wide, painted over, and now the paint was cracking.

She thought of her mother’s lullaby — the one her mother hummed while cooking, off-key, always the same melody, a tune Maya had never heard anywhere else. She’d asked about it once, at fourteen, feeling foolish. “Where’s that song from?” Her mother had gone very still at the stove. “I don’t know, sweetheart. I must have made it up.” And she’d changed the subject so fast it left a draft.

She thought of two nights ago, lying awake in this house, hearing humming through the west-wing wall. The same melody. Note for note. Hummed by a woman who’d lost a daughter twenty years ago.

Maya had told herself it was a coincidence. There were only so many lullabies in the world. But standing in the bathroom at dawn, staring at a scar she could now remember being made, the word “coincidence” felt like something she was using to hold a door shut — and the door was opening anyway.

She thought of her mother’s lullaby — the one her mother hummed while cooking, off-key, always the same melody. She thought of two nights ago, lying awake, hearing humming through the west-wing wall. The same melody. Note for note.

Her life didn’t tilt. It capsized.

She didn’t go back to sleep. She sat on the edge of the bathtub until the sky outside the small window went from black to gray to a thin, pale gold, and she watched the light come up over the Hollywood Hills the way she’d watched it come up every morning for three weeks — except now she knew she had never once watched it alone. Evelyn had been awake too, on the other side of the wall. Maybe Evelyn had watched the same sunrise. Maybe that was the whole point of all of it: two women watching the same dawn from opposite sides of a wall, one of them not knowing why her chest ached.

No more. Maya was done not knowing.

At breakfast she set her phone on the kitchen table between the coffee pot and the fruit bowl, the adoption petition glowing on the screen, and looked Richard and Evelyn dead in the eyes.

“Tell me who Grace Ashford is,” she said. “And this time, don’t you dare lie to me.”