SIENNA POV
Aunt Claire made eggs the way people make things when they're anxious, thoroughly, with total concentration, as though the eggs required it.
I sat at the kitchen table and watched her. The kitchen was narrow and warm and smelled like coffee and old wood, and everything in it had been arranged with the kind of deliberate care that accumulates over years of living alone, the mugs hung on hooks in descending size, the dish towels folded in thirds, a small bunch of dried lavender tied above the window with a piece of twine that was slightly too short and had been knotted twice to compensate. Aunt Claire had lived in this house for eleven years. It looked like it.
She set the plate in front of me without ceremony and poured coffee without asking, which I appreciated.
'Did you sleep?' she said.
'Somehow.'
She sat down across from me with her own mug and wrapped both hands around it the way she'd been holding it on the porch last night. I made a note of that, the two-handed grip, a self-soothing gesture she'd had as long as I could remember. It appeared when she was worried. I hadn't seen her not worried in a year and a half.
I ate. The eggs were good. Outside, Black Hollow was doing its morning performance, a pickup truck moving slowly down Aldermoor Street, a woman walking a dog on the opposite sidewalk, thin October sunlight doing its best against the fog that hadn't fully lifted.
Everything looked ordinary. Everything had looked ordinary last night too, until the window bolt and the shape in the treeline.
I drank my coffee and decided to ask three questions.
The first one I'd been holding since the drive up.
'The letter,' I said. 'Signed J. You told me you didn't know who sent it.'
Aunt Claire's hands stayed where they were around her mug. 'That's right.'
'I want to know if that's still your answer, or if it was the answer you thought I needed at the time.'
A pause, not long, three seconds at most, but I'd learned to measure Aunt Claire's pauses the way you measure gaps in ice. She said, 'It's still my answer. I don't know who J is.'
'I have a guess. But a guess isn't knowing.'
'What's the guess?'
'Someone who was with your mother near the end. Someone who wanted us to know she didn't suffer and couldn't afford to say more than that.'
'Couldn't afford to,' I repeated. 'That's a specific way to put it.'
She looked at me over the rim of her mug. Aunt Claire had grey eyes and the kind of face that didn't give much away when it didn't want to, but I'd grown up reading the margins of that face, the small negotiations happening behind the stillness. Right now the margins said, careful.
'It's the honest way to put it,' she said. 'Some people are in situations where saying more would cost them something they can't afford to lose.'
'What kind of situations?'
She set her mug down and looked at her hands. 'Sienna. It's your first morning.'
'I know what morning it is.'
'I just mean…' She stopped. Tried again. 'There's a sequence to things. Some things make more sense after other things.'
I recognized this. It wasn't deflection exactly, Aunt Claire had never been a deflector, not really, it wasn't in her nature. It was more like she had a map of the conversation she wanted to have and she was trying to navigate me toward it in an order she'd decided on, and I was cutting across the path she'd planned. I'd been cutting across paths she'd planned for years. We both knew it. We'd reached a kind of affectionate peace with it.
'All right,' I said. 'Second question.'
✦
'The curfew sign. The full moon curfew. How long has that been there?'
This one she answered without hesitation, which meant it was in the category of things she'd decided I could know. 'As long as I've lived here. It was already in place when I moved in eleven years ago. The locals say it's been there longer than that, forty years, maybe more.'
'And people follow it.'
'People follow it.' A slight pause. 'The ones who've been here long enough know why.'
'Why?'
The pause this time was longer, and with a quality I associated with Aunt Claire deciding how much truth to attach to a true statement. She said, 'Because the things in the woods after dark are dangerous, and the people here have made a practical decision about their own safety.'
'What things?'
'Animals.' She said it flatly. 'Large ones. This close to old forest you get predators that aren't used to human proximity. The curfew is a precaution.'
I looked at her. She looked back at me. We both sat with the space between us for a moment.
'That's the official answer,' I said.
She didn't confirm or deny it. She picked up her mug again. Both hands.
'Third question,' I said.
'Last night you said you'd prepared the bedroom. The window.'
Something moved across Aunt Claire's face, not guilt, not quite, but the expression of someone watching a consequence they'd calculated arrive slightly ahead of schedule. She said, 'What about it?'
'The deadbolt. Second floor. New hardware.'
A beat, then, 'This is old forest country. Sometimes things come closer to the houses than they should.'
'A deadbolt on a window two floors off the ground,' I said, 'is not a precaution against a bear, Aunt Claire.'
She was quiet for long enough that I heard the pickup truck come back down Aldermoor in the other direction. Then she stood up and went to the counter and came back with the coffee pot and refilled my mug without asking, which was what Aunt Claire did when she needed a moment to think and wanted to look useful while she was thinking.
She sat back down. She said, 'There are things I want to tell you in the right order. I mean that. I'm not…I'm not keeping things from you to protect myself. I'm keeping a sequence because some of what I need to tell you is going to change how you hear everything else, and I need you to have the earlier pieces first.'
I studied her.
'How long do you need?' I said.
'Give me a few days. Let yourself settle. Walk around. Get a sense of the town.' She met my eyes. 'I promise you, Sienna. I will tell you. All of it.'
'You've said that before.'
'I know.' Her voice was quiet. 'I mean it differently now.'
I didn't ask what had changed. I could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way she was sitting like someone who had made a decision that cost her something and was carrying it carefully. Something had changed in her, recently, in whatever calculation she'd been running for years. I didn't know what had tipped it.
I would find out. I always did.
✦
She walked me to the door after breakfast and pressed a key into my hand, old brass, worn smooth, on a plain ring with no label.
'For emergencies,' she said.
'What kind of emergencies?'
'The kind where you need somewhere that isn't here.' She said it like it was straightforward. 'Fourteen Vane Street. It's a cabin at the edge of the east property line, it's been in the family for years, nobody uses it regularly. You should know where it is.'
I looked at the key. I looked at her. 'Aunt Claire. Why would I need an emergency location on my first day in town?'
She put her hand briefly over mine, closing my fingers around the key. 'Probably you won't,' she said. 'But now you have it either way.'
She went back inside. The screen door closed behind her with the soft specific sound of old springs, and I stood on the porch for a moment with the key in my fist, looking at Aldermoor Street in the thin morning light.
Three questions. Two real answers and one that wasn't lying but wasn't the truth either. A key to an address she hadn't explained.
I added it to the folder in my head, the mental one I kept alongside the paper one, the one I'd been building since I was sixteen and first started noticing the shape of the gaps in everything Aunt Claire had ever told me about my mother.
The key was warm from her hand. I put it in my jacket pocket and went to find the school.