The Last House Guest

by Megan Miranda

I’ve known enough of loss to accept that grief may lose its sharpness with time, but memory only tightens. Moments replay.

learned quickly that they were not asking questions in order to gather your thoughts but to assess you.

But anyone could take someone down; even I could do that. To hoist someone out of one world and

into another—that was true power.

Looking back, this was the thing I was most taken with—the idea that you didn’t have to apologize. Not for what you’d done and not for who you were.

grief did not create anything that had not existed before. It only heightened what was already there.

Instead, I leaned in to it, like I’d learned from

Sadie, because as she’d taught me, there was no use hiding from myself.

But that was the thing about loving someone—it only counted when you knew their flaws and did it anyway.

The secret to success that eluded even Parker, he said, was that you had to take great risks for great rewards. That to change your life, to truly change it, you had to be willing to lose.

A man who would act exactly the same whether someone was watching or not. The rarest thing.

Ambition wasn’t just in the work. Ambition, I believed, was tinged with a sort of desperation, something closer to panic. Like a dormant switch deep inside that could be forced only by necessity. Something to push up against until, finally, you caught.