The Last House Guest

by Megan Miranda

It was a town carved out of the untouched wild, mountains on one side, ocean on the other, accessible only by a single coastal road and patience.

It existed through pure stubbornness, pushing back against nature from both sides.

the only thing I ever saw in the darkened windows was my distorted reflection watching back. My own personal haunting.

IN THE DAYS AFTER Sadie’s death, I remained on the outskirts, coming only when summoned, speaking only when called upon. Everything mattered, and nothing did.

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

But that was one of the things about seeing people only in the summer—there was nothing gradual about a change. We grew in jolts. We shifted abruptly.

You could have a dream as long as you were willing to give something up for it. Just as long as you remained invisible, as was intended.

A world had opened up to me from the slip of a blade. A world of untouchable things.

tonight I did not have to be myself. Tonight was for forgetting.

Looking back, I realized that 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.

The biggest danger of all in Littleport was assuming that you were invisible. That no one else saw you.

grief did not create anything that had not existed before. It only heightened what was already there. Removing the binds that once shielded me.

you can hurtle through darkness by momentum alone, without a single conscious thought, with no one to see you go.

My stomach twisted. Someone had been watching. Not just the Loman house. Not just the rentals. But me.

It was the story of who I had been until the moment I met Sadie Loman, and I chose her. My life in her hands, restructured, recast. No longer adrift or alone.

Only now that I was past it did I see how close I truly came. The darkness that I was ready to dive headfirst into.

I kept looking at all the places death might be lurking.

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

I knew the dangers of the water, had known them half my life, growing up here. But I had not considered the dangers inside other people.

He waited to see if I’d say more, but I knew this was a tactic—silence and waiting for someone else to fill it, to reveal the things they’d wanted to keep hidden.

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.

I thought about the ways we dressed to present ourselves. How we slipped into another disguise, another skin. How we shifted our appearance in ways to say something to one another.