Chapter 8: The Lake House

"The deputy ran my plate in Pearl's driveway," Devin said over breakfast. "My address is on my registration."

"So my mother found you with a computer," I said.

"Yes. Not by magic." He rubbed his eyes. "I still don't like it."

The new bottle sat in the middle of the table where he had put it, and neither of us touched it.

I took my capsules from my own bottle instead.

I watched my own hand do it.

"Pearl says my grandmother left me a letter," I said. "It's in her desk at the lake house. She told me on the phone last night."

"Then I'll take you."

"No." I stood up. "I mean, drive me. But I want to go in alone."

"Lydia."

"It's my grandmother's house. I want to walk in on my own feet."

He looked at me for a while.

"I'll be in the car with the engine running," he said. "Ten minutes, and then I'm coming in."

Marblehead is forty minutes from Lorain on a clear day, with the lake showing grey at the end of every street.

Grandma Ruth's house stood at the end of a gravel lane, white clapboard with a blue door and a long dock out into the water.

I had spent every summer of my life there until I was twelve.

Today there were six cars in the lane.

Music was coming from the porch.

I walked in through the blue door, and nobody stopped me.

In the front room, ten or twelve people my sister's age were sprawled on my grandmother's sofas with drinks in their hands.

Britta was sitting in the middle of them on the arm of a chair, wearing Grandma Ruth's yellow cardigan.

She saw me, and her smile came up fast.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Never Loved Me. Now I Don't Remember Them. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.