Page 135 of A Heart So Haunted
I love you, I hadn’t said.
I love you, I thought, because I was scared; he might still be able to hear it, if I said it out loud. Could he hear me still?
The room exhaled in a rush of air, so profound that the curtains fluttered against the walls. The sheet over one of the chairs slipped off the back. As if the house were sighing.Letting go.
And with it, Hadrian’s body. He fell apart in my fingers like smoke. Like the dust on a moth’s wings in the wind, never to be seen again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Iwaited eight days before I found myself at the county office. This time, it wasn’t for a restraining order against my mother.
The same woman with a chain on her glasses glanced up from a stack of papers on her desk. I ground my teeth together, breath leaden.
“I need to find a burial plot,” I said. “You have those here. With death certificates.”
She stared at me. Snapped her gum. I didn’t bother to look at the clock—I had over an hour this time, and Emma was sitting in my car with the AC blowing at full speed. The final summer weeks were upon us, when it was debatable if hell had risen from the depths of the earth to scorch us one last time. Then by a miracle, we’d wake up one morning and realize there was a chill in the air and a smidge of humidity had been shaved away.
Soon. It meant time was passing.
I didn’t want time to pass. Not yet.
She shifted her stack of papers. “Name.”
I swallowed. “Hadrian Belfaunte.”
She turned in her swivel chair. Today, she wore a blue floral dress that swished with each step. My jaw remained locked as she rounded the corner.
When I’d searched Colleton County’s death record office, I should have guessed it would be kept here.
She returned moments later. This time, only two papers. She smacked them into the copier and punched a button. The machine coughed, whirred, then spit the papers back out.
She returned to her seat. Stamped them with a signature stamp, then handed them to me.
“Here.”
I walked away before she could close the curtains on me.
“Where are we going, again?” Emma asked. She unwrapped a stick of gum before offering me one. I shook my head. “Suit yourself.”
“A plot,” I said. Because I didn’t know what else to tell her. I just knew I needed her with me when I went.
“Did you murder someone?” She chewed her gum much gentler than the woman at the county office. “I didn’t bring my gloves.”
I clutched the steering wheel at ten and two. Dust kicked up behind us as I followed the GPS off the main road until we met an entrance ramp for the highway. Soon enough, we were on the straight stretch back to Stetson, and the hour and a half slowly morphed into forty minutes, then thirty, then twenty.
When I’d mapped the gravesite, I hadn’t paid much attention to the direction or the distance. Only that I needed to get there.
Questions burned in my chest. Nothing had happened at the house since Hadrian had vanished. I waited up every night until a quarter past midnight, but no cries came. My dreams were nonexistent—I fell asleep, then woke up. Wash, rinse, repeat. The house renovation was coming along, but Sayer came over more often than not to sleep on my couch, and Emma had mentioned moving to Stetson when her lease was up. “I’m hybrid,” she’d said. “What are they going to do, fire me?”
They didn’t fire her. They gave her a stipend to move to a different office—one thirty minutes south of Stetson, a lot smaller, but withonly one in-office day a week. “A family emergency” she’d called it, when her supervisor asked. “I need to be close to my sister,” was her only reasoning.
“Have you heard from that hottie yet?” she asked.
I gave a hollow head shake. “No.”
I felt her eyes on me. I didn’t meet them.
Going through the restraining order process was another headache. But I did it. Because it was best. Especially when I had no plans to sell the house anytime soon.
