Page 58 of Holly & Hemlock
He closes the book—no glance at the page, so I know he was just waiting, not reading. “Miss Vale,” he replies, then, with a fractional smile: “Nora. What brings you to me with such purpose?” His smile turns into a smirk.
I approach him, hands in my pockets. “I want to know the truth about the house.”
A beat. He lifts one eyebrow, making it clear he is unimpressed by both the demand and the urgency. “I thought you already had the answers. The kitchen is still echoing with Whitby’s existential crisis.”
He’s baiting me. I decide not to rise. “I’ve read the drafts of the will. I know about the chain, the curse, whatever you want to call it. I want to know your version.”
He sets the book down on a lacquered table, fingers splayed on the cover as if bracing for turbulence. “My version?”
“Yes,” I say. “You grew up here. You know things no one else will say out loud.”
Larkin studies me, and for a moment his face is less mask and more mirror—reflecting, maybe, the exhaustion of someone who has been playing the same part since childhood. “Lane told you,” he says, not a question.
“He told me enough,” I say. “But you’re the only one who can fill in the blanks.”
He stands in a single, unbroken motion, comes to where I stand by the fireplace, and leans beside me, close but not touching. The sunlight cuts his features, the shadow slicing his mouth in half.
“When I was a child, I thought the house was alive,” he says quietly. “I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. I mean I was convinced it could bleed, that it had a nervous system running through the walls.”
He traces a line on the window’s edge with his finger, leaving a smear. “Whenever I tried to leave—really leave, not just run down the drive but go somewhere else, change who I was—it found a way to call me back. Sickness, accidents, letters in the mail that had no stamp or sender. Even my ownmind . . . it became a compulsion to me to return here. Even if I was excited, happy to go somewhere else. That excitement would never last. It was as if I had no control over my own thoughts.”
The story is so theatrical it should sound ridiculous. Instead, it makes the fine hairs on my forearm stand up.
“What did it want from you?” I ask.
He laughs, low, almost bitter. “The same thing it wants from everyone: to be remembered. To last. To keep the people it loves. To control them.” He leans closer, conspiratorial. “Hemlock is a jealous god.”
I watch the way his mouth moves. There is something about the flatness of his affect that makes every word more dangerous.
“If you knew all this, why didn’t you warn me?”
He shrugs. “No one believes warnings. They just make better ghosts.” He turns, putting the window at his back, the light haloing the edges of his hair. “What’s your theory?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe that there’s a reason I was chosen. And it’s not because my aunt loved me.”
Larkin’s smile is cold. “She didn’t love anyone.”
I nod, surprised by how much that hurts. “Did she ever tell you why she wrote me into the final will? Was there something she needed me to do?”
He looks at the floor, then at the dust motes swirling in the shaft of light between us. “She said you were maybe immune.”
The silence eats several seconds before I answer. “To what?”
He steps away, paces to the shelves, runs his hand over the cracked spines of a row of volumes labeled with Roman numerals instead of titles. “To the pattern. The compulsion. The thing that keeps us coming back.”
I follow him, watching the way his body moves—a precision that is almost mathematical. “Why would she think that?”
He pulls a book at random, flips through the pages without looking. “Because your mother left. It didn’t take her the way it took everyone else. Whitby, Lane, me—we’re all too invested. You’re an anomaly.”
“Lane said that was only because she was young.”
“Hmm. Perhaps. And perhaps Maeve based it all on some ridiculous notion.
“I don’t feel immune,” I say. “I feel just as trapped as everyone else.”
He looks up, and for a second I see the boy he must have been: clever, isolated, desperate for approval. “If you were as trapped as us, you wouldn’t be asking these questions. You’d be out there, shoveling snow, making peace with it.” He closes the book, sets it on the table. “You’re here because you want to break it.”
I do not deny it.
