Chapter 2
Keaton reached the garage keypad and punched in a sequence without looking back at me. The small camera above the eaves caught him in profile, his shoulder hunched against the morning chill.
The keypad blinked red.
He tried again, slower, as if the house had misunderstood him.
Red.
Keaton gave a short laugh and lifted both hands toward the driveway.
“See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. One little code change, and now everybody gets a show.”
The camera’s tiny status light glowed above him. My phone buzzed in my pocket with the security alert, confirming what I could already see: the system was recording.
“Move away from the door,” I said.
He turned. “I’m not breaking anything.”
“Then stop trying to get in.”
Behind him, a suitcase tipped sideways in the gravel. Someone righted it. The relatives who’d arrived with coolers and lawn chairs shifted around the driveway, their faces turned toward us. I could feel them measuring the silence, waiting to see who would blink first.
Mom came closer, the grocery bag swinging from one hand.
“You’re humiliating everyone,” she said. “Look around, Arden. These are your family.”
I looked around. At the people who had made plans for my house without asking me. At the flowers Mom had brought for my bedroom. At the children’s booster seat strapped into a car that had been parked beside my porch.
“I’m not the one who arranged a stay without permission.”
She tightened her grip on the bag. “We have been coming here for years.”
The words landed harder than the cold. Not because I hadn’t already suspected it, but because she said them like proof that she was entitled to keep doing it.
“Without telling me,” I said.
“You were busy. You work nights. You’re always busy.”
“That doesn’t make my house available.”
Dad stepped between us, though not quite enough to separate us. “Family plans shouldn’t require formal permission.”
“Why not?”
He frowned, as if I’d asked a childish question. “Because we’re family. We don’t need to fill out a form every time we get together.”
“Then why did Mom tell everyone not to post pictures because I didn’t know?”
For the first time, his eyes moved away from mine. A breeze lifted the edge of a paper grocery bag. Somewhere down the shore, a boat engine coughed and settled into a steady roar.
Mom’s mouth thinned.
“That message was taken out of context.”
“Which part?”
She didn’t answer. She turned instead toward the crowd, looking for a face that would help her take control of the story. Several relatives suddenly found the lake fascinating.
Aunt Liora stepped around a cooler, careful not to scuff her pale shoes in the gravel. Her gaze went from me to the house.
“I only need the main bedroom,” she said. “My back can’t handle the small guest bed anymore.”
I stared at her.
She lowered her voice, but not enough to make the request private. “Your mother said she’d put flowers in there. The room gets so much nicer light.”
The fresh flowers lay crushed at the top of Mom’s grocery bag, their stems wrapped in damp paper. I could see a few pale petals pressed against the plastic.
“You’re asking me for a bedroom you’ve already decided you’re using.”
Liora’s cheeks colored. “I thought this was settled.”
“By whom?”
She glanced toward Mom. Mom’s expression softened into the patient, familiar look she used when she wanted me to seem unreasonable for having feelings.
“Arden, don’t turn every small thing into a confrontation.”
A laugh almost escaped me. Small things. The keypad. The bedroom. The hidden key. A list of dates in somebody else’s handwriting, tucked beneath my own utility shed.
I reached into my jacket, my fingers brushing the zippered pouch. I didn’t take it out. Not yet.
“Who installed the lockbox behind my shed?”
Dad’s head snapped toward me.
Mom went still. Even Keaton stopped smiling.
For one breath, the driveway seemed to empty of sound. Then a child asked something from the back seat of a car, and an adult shushed them.
Keaton’s eyes narrowed. “What lockbox?”
I watched the question travel across the group. A few people looked confused. One man near the coolers glanced at Dad, then looked down at his shoes.
Hollis had been standing behind Mom, half hidden by her shoulder. At the word lockbox, the color drained from her face. She turned slightly away from Keaton, but not before I saw her eyes flick to the utility shed.
She knew it.
The discovery didn’t make me feel safer. It made the driveway seem smaller, the family around me less like a crowd and more like a wall.
Dad rubbed his thumb along the seam of his jacket. “Now’s not the time.”
“That’s what people say when they don’t want to answer.”
“Not in front of everybody,” he said.
“Then you can answer after everybody leaves.”
Mom let out a sharp breath. “You can’t interrogate your father like he’s some criminal.”
“I asked who put a lockbox on my property.”
Keaton stepped away from the keypad, but his attention stayed fixed on me. “You’re acting like somebody robbed you.”
“You had a key to a house I never gave you permission to enter.”
“I didn’t say I had a key.”
“No,” I said. “You said you had another way in.”
His jaw worked once. He looked past me toward the side of the house, then back to the driveway, as if calculating how much he could say without making things worse.
“Maybe I meant the old code,” he said.
“You tried the old code.”
“And it didn’t work.” He spread his hands again, all innocence. “That’s the end of it.”
The camera kept watching. My phone sat heavy in my pocket, warm against my palm. I imagined the recording being saved somewhere beyond this driveway, beyond the reach of anyone’s excuses.
Mom set the grocery bag on the gravel. The flowers slid farther to one side.
“Fine,” she said. “If you want to punish all of us, do it. But don’t pretend this is about a lock.”
I felt my throat tighten. For years, I’d heard some version of that whenever I said no: the real issue wasn’t the request, but my refusal to make it painless for everyone else.
“It’s about who gets to decide what happens in my house.”
“And we’re your family,” Dad said again, quieter this time.
The quiet didn’t make it gentler. It made it sound like a debt he expected me to pay.
I looked past him to Hollis. She had folded her arms tight across her chest, fingertips digging into her sleeves. Keaton was watching me, so she kept her face turned toward the driveway.
Then she took one small step closer.
“Arden,” she said.
Keaton looked at her. “What?”
May you like
Her mouth opened, then closed. She glanced at me again, and I saw the fear there, plain now and impossible to mistake.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked. “Alone. Before he notices.”
