CHAPTER 1
Lenore
Friday, September 18
21 Days Until the House Is Sold
My grandmother once told me that love is kept in the attic.
A lot of people don’t have an attic, so maybe they store their love in the garage, or in a shoebox tucked into their linen cupboard. Love, she said, is in the things we keep. A wedding dress, zipped up in a garment bag even though it’ll never be worn again. Parents who can’t bring themselves to let go of baby clothes, long after their kids are grown. Birthday cards from years past, and handwritten notes tucked into second-grade lunch pails, saved for a lifetime.
Love means holding on to something because it’s sentimental, rather than because of any particular usefulness. Love isn’t meant to be useful. It’s only meant to be.
Which is why a cardboard box is riding shotgun in my rental car. I’m climbing the unpaved driveway, dirt crunching beneath tires as I pass the realty sign staked into the grass, IN ESCROW slapped over it in bold red letters.
I lean into the steering wheel to stare up through the windshield, getting a proper look at home for the first time in three years: a saltbox with a center chimney and symmetrical windows, clad in creamy clapboard, sagging in the middle like a soufflé taken out of the oven too soon. Dappled sunlight filters through the century-old sugar maples, shadows dancing across the grass.
An acute melancholy washes over me as I park by the side porch, car engine ticking as it cools after the long drive. I wait four breaths—maybe five—staring at the battered storm door that guards the mudroom. Somewhere in a memory, the hinges are whining open, rubber gardening boots clomping across pumpkin pine floorboards that run almost the length of the house.
“Look, we all get it.” Katie’s voice carries over the car speaker, breaking the spell. “You deserve some time away. It’s just the thought of you all alone in that big old house.”
I huff a quiet laugh. “You don’t have to say ‘we’ all the time. I know you’re only calling because Damien asked.” It’s almost routine, at this point—like he believes he can soften the blow that is his continued lack of confidence in me by having someone else deliver it.
“We all worry about you, Nore, not just your brother,” Katie says.
“Hold on,” I say. “I’m taking you off speaker.” I tug the keys from the ignition and pop the car door open.
Crisp air kisses my skin, at least fifteen degrees cooler than the stagnant sun beating through the windshield. We’re a few days shy of autumn, but the weather has already started to turn. I tuck the phone between my ear and shoulder and haul the cardboard box off the passenger seat before climbing out.
The dirt beneath my suede clogs is packed hard by decades of cars coming and going. Somewhere in the distance, a lawn mower hums.
“You know you’re always welcome to stay with us,” Katie is saying. “Sometimes it helps when you’re going through this sort of thing to be around people.”
This sort of thing could refer to any number of things. A broken engagement. A wave of fresh grief, six months after my grandmother’s passing. A three-week vacation from my dead-end job as a barista in Manhattan—unpaid vacation, naturally—or maxing out my already strained credit card on a last-minute train ticket to Burlington, and then a rental car when I arrived.
“That’s the problem,” I say. “I’m always around people.” I bump the car door shut with my hip. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want to intrude, and with you guys having the baby soon—”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” Katie says, but it comes out sounding a bit strained. “You’d take the guest suite, with your own bathroom and everything. So long as you clean up after yourself and toss a little money toward water and electricity, we’ll hardly notice.”
Not that I’m ungrateful, but confining myself to a sparsely decorated bedroom in a cookie-cutter Connecticut suburb with my brother and his very pregnant wife is not going to do me any favors right now.
“I appreciate you,” I say, “but really. You’re going to have a million things on your plate, like trying to figure out how to take care of a whole new human. The last thing you need is me moping around your mother-in-law suite.”
She groans. “God, I hope your mom never tries to move in here.”
I can’t really blame her for that one. “This will be good for me,” I say. “Really. I haven’t been up to visit in years. Maybe it’ll help me—” I was about to say Maybe it’ll help me say goodbye, but my throat constricted around the word visit, and everything afterward came out strangled. There is no one left to visit. All that’s left is the house and its contents. A fingerprint, pressed into the cluttered forests and rambling Green Mountains of northern Vermont.
It’s fine. Maybe it’ll help me is a complete sentence.
“All right,” Katie says dubiously, “but you know we’re always a phone call away, if you need anything.”
There’s that we again.
“Unless you’re in labor,” I say.
“Yeah, maybe don’t call then,” she agrees.
We hang up.
I pocket my phone and shield my eyes against the sun with my now-free hand. Behind the house, row after row of apple trees stretch across the hill, their fruit reddening in late summer. A breeze fingers through the branches, fragrant with exhaust and fresh-cut grass.
I catch a glimpse of the ride-on lawn mower moving between the trees. The rider’s face is shadowed beneath a baseball cap, but it doesn’t look like Thomas, our old groundskeeper. I raise a hand in greeting.
The mower makes a zero-point turn and traverses an alley between the Honeycrisps and Cortlands, the rumbling engine fading over the hill.
“Not so alone after all,” I mutter, dropping my hand with a bland smile still pasted on my face.
I step onto the side porch, where the door is guarded by a keypad lockbox put in place by the real estate agent. I enter the code, 1-7-9-2. The lockbox beeps and flashes red twice. My brow pinches. Maybe I hit a wrong button the first time. I try again, but it blinks in reply, refusing access.
Well, that’s annoying. I lift the corner of the welcome mat. Where there was once a spare key, there’s now only a faint dirt imprint in the shape of the doormat and a few leaves pressed paper flat. I straighten and glance around. Bags of gardening soil are slumped against the clapboard. A ceramic flowerpot sits empty. I set the moving box down and jostle the pot aside, stoneware scraping across the porch, but there’s no key under there, either.
Far away, an engine shuts down. Dog-day cicadas buzz in the ensuing quiet.
I’ll ask the groundskeeper. I dip my chin in a nod, like I need my own encouragement, and start across the grass to the outbuilding. Not the red barn, which competes with the farmhouse as the focal point of French Hill and has long since been converted into a seating area for visitors during apple season, with rustic picnic tables and hot cider sold for fifty cents a cup. No, the other building, tucked into the back acreage. The corrugated steel siding has no place on a postcard, but it’s functional.
Parked beside the utility tractor is a beautiful old pickup, cobalt and cream paint gleaming in the sun. I don’t recognize it. I stop in the yawning mouth of the garage door, my eyes adjusting to the gloom. It smells like wood and spilled oil.
“Knock, knock,” I call out, but the words are swallowed whole by the growling of an air compressor.
I take a few tentative steps inside. A man sits on a rolling stool, patching a tire on the ride-on lawn mower with his back to me. His white T-shirt is smudged with dirt, the lightweight fabric stretched taut between strong shoulders and almost translucent in places with sweat. The back of his neck has a honeyed tan. My eyes trail down his faded jeans to the threadbare and discolored hems around scuffed work boots.
I’ve met my share of attractive men in the city, but there is something about a man who knows his way around a toolshed. Not an easy quality to come by in coffee shops on the Lower East Side.
I clear my throat, but it goes unnoticed. “Excuse me!” I shout over the compressor.
The man swings a look over his shoulder, and it’s like being clotheslined in the stomach.
“Callan,” I blurt, the name exiting my lungs in a rush. I’m twenty-seven, but the sight of him takes me back to my childhood as surely as the house does. It’s also a reminder of just how much time has passed. A short beard skims his jaw, the same color as the thick, wavy hair beneath his ball cap: deep umber that veers on black.
He reaches across the lawn mower and shuts down the compressor. An oppressive silence radiates outward. Somewhere high in the maples, a cicada answers. His hat is turned backward, so there’s no hiding the way his dark blue eyes scrape over me.
“What are you doing in here?” I demand.
His eyes jump to mine. “You should really wear pants out here,” he says, and points at my bare legs with the air hose.
I look down, twisting over my shoulder to check my calves before facing forward again. Technically, yes, I’m not wearing pants, but that’s because I’m wearing shorts. Loose-fit jean shorts with deep pockets, and an oversize sweater to temper the in-between weather. Not quite the scandal implied by his statement. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
“It’s tick season,” he clarifies. His voice has that curt quality that so many New Englanders have, caring about you in a cut-and-dried way that doesn’t spare your feelings.
I resist the temptation to bend down and scratch a phantom itch. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m the groundskeeper,” he says. “I took over for my dad a couple years ago.”
I would have appreciated it if Damien could’ve mentioned that, but I suppose it would’ve been inconsequential, in his eyes. I never gave voice to the intense crush I harbored on my older brother’s closest friend—one of those formative crushes, too obsessive and embarrassing to ever amount to anything.
I hadn’t seen him since my brother’s wedding three years ago, where Callan drank too much whiskey and turned me down for a dance. That was the last time we were all together, two weeks before Damien and I moved our grandmother into long-term care. When the farmhouse was still hers—was still home.
It all fell apart that night. I’ve been dealing with the fallout ever since.
I comb my fingers through my hair, raking my bangs back from my forehead. They had seemed like a good idea, a couple weeks ago. “I couldn’t, um—the passcode for the lockbox doesn’t seem to work.”
“We changed it after the new buyers signed the paperwork. For security reasons.” Cal rolls his stool over to the tool chest, lifting the hem of his T-shirt to dab sweat from his brow. Light creases are pressed into his toned stomach from sitting, and dark hair trails down from his belly button. I make a conscious effort to look anywhere else.
“I gathered that,” I say to the rafters. “So it would be great if I could get the new code.” I risk lowering my gaze and am relieved to find him decent once more.
Cal threads a different nozzle onto the hose, tossing me a glance that crinkles his brow. “Did you call your real estate agent?”
I swing an arm through the open door, back the way I came. “It’s my house!”
He breathes a humorless laugh and shakes his head, the drawer on the tool chest rattling as he slides it shut. “The numbers are flipped around,” he says. I stare at him, wary. “2-9-7-1.”
I turn to leave, but his voice stops me in my tracks.
“Hopefully you don’t plan to stay long. It’s set to close in October.”
I look back over my shoulder. “I know that.” I make a solid effort not to sound like those words are taking the remaining fragments of my heart and grinding them into the dirt.
Callan considers me for the count of seconds before his gaze cuts away. “I have to get back to work,” he mumbles, and switches on the compressor.
I unleash a frustrated ugh that no one—not even me—can hear before stomping out of the building.
This is still my house, mine and Damien’s—for a few more weeks, anyway. It even bears my last name on the listing: French Hill Farm, a colonial farmhouse on seventy-three sweeping acres in Whitbury, Vermont.
It’s been in the French family for more than two centuries, but maintaining such a large property—and, in particular, the aging farmhouse—is expensive. Income from running the modest ten-acre orchard has allowed us to keep a groundskeeper on payroll, but there are problems with the house itself that cost too much to fix: rotting support beams in the damp basement, knob-and-tube electrical wiring that’s waited half a century to be replaced. I don’t understand how Gran managed this place for as long as she did.
As I follow along the back side of the house, I can picture her out in the garden like yesterday: a straw hat shading her steely braid, the knees of her overalls caked in dirt. We would play freeze tag out in the orchard while she worked. When the sun set, she would strip the gardening gloves from her hands, pinch her fingers between her lips, and whistle loud enough that it could be heard across all seventy-three acres.
It was a good life for a kid. The best decision my mom ever made was tracking down our paternal grandmother. It kept us out of foster care, at any rate.
The problem started when I was a little older, with wanting to be anything more than Gabrielle French’s granddaughter. It’s impossible to outrun your family name in a small town—even our road is named after my several-times-great-grandfather. I was a houseplant, my roots pressed up against the sides of my pot, desperate for space to thrive.
I stoop to collect the box from the porch and then punch the numbers into the keypad, 2-9-7-1. “Stupid,” I mutter when it blinks green, and I tug open the hatch to take the key. Propping the storm door open with a knee, I unlock the mudroom.
An unfamiliar scent slams into me: something manufactured, a plug-in air freshener dispensing pine and cinnamon. I brace a hand on the wall for balance as I slide out of my clogs, then do a reluctant tick check around my ankles before pushing deeper into the house.
There is a fireplace in every major room—the entire house is built around a crooked central chimney, but the kitchen is the only room where it hasn’t been bricked shut to save money on heating in the winter. I smile at the beehive oven built into the clay brick. I’ve missed this place. Beside the kitchen is the keeping room, still decorated in that kitschy Americana style that Gran loved, with braided rugs and a Boston rocking chair, but any signs of ownership were scrubbed clean for real estate agents to march potential buyers through. Where family photos used to hang, now there’s folk art and framed needlework.
An ache blooms in my chest. This place is an echo of the house I grew up in, stripped of the finer details that made it a home.
I climb the curling central staircase to the second floor, wood groaning beneath my feet. A short, airy hallway is drenched in toile wallpaper, with twin doors waiting at either end. I reach for the door to my right.
The door creaks open on its own. At sleepovers, I used to tell my friends it was a ghost, but the truth is that the entire house slants ever so slightly to the east—a side effect of the earth shifting beneath it over the last two centuries.
The bedroom beyond is a blank canvas: There are no drawings taped to the walls anymore. Sunlight soaks through sheer white curtains.
I set the cardboard box on the bed atop the cream-colored quilt and fold back the flaps. I rifle through faded Polaroids, pulpy mass-market paperbacks, a small velvet ring box, a plaid wool scarf, and a vintage watch with a mother-of-pearl face, its soft ticking the only sound to fill the silence. I extract a leather-bound journal and turn it over in my hands.
For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with my grandmother’s observation—not in full. Love isn’t meant to be stored in the darkest corners of the house, collecting dust. Those spaces are reserved for a specific kind of love, the sort that has nowhere left to go. For the fragments we save to make up for the greater loss.
I don’t have an attic in my little shared flat in Manhattan, but I do have a cardboard moving box with U-Haul branding on the side, water damage wrinkling one corner. It’s in this box that I’ve stored all the evidence of my love for my grandmother, filing away little bits and pieces even as she slipped through my fingers.
Now, that box is back here in Vermont, where it all began.
I thumb through the journal, page after page of impeccable sloping handwriting until somewhere around the middle. After that, it’s blank. I’ve read all her other journals, lifetimes I never met her in. It’s this last journal that I’ve been dreading, because it’s in here that I might find an echo of the woman who raised me.
I don’t know whether that’ll help, but there’s only one way to know for certain. I take a deep breath and flip back to the first entry, written seventeen years ago.
Copyright © 2026 by Kristyn J. Miller