The Last House Guest

by Megan Miranda

It was hard to simultaneously grieve and reconstruct your own alibi. It was tempting to accuse someone else just to give yourself some space. It would have been so easy.

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

But if I’d learned nothing else from the Lomans, I’d at least learned this: Promises made without clarity of thought still counted. A careless yes and you were bound.

What had brought me here and now what was keeping me here. Beyond the boundaries of this town, there was a directionless, limitless wild, but anywhere might as well have been nowhere to someone like me.

I thought maybe this was the key to success: eternal optimism. Taking an insult and repurposing it for your own benefit. Taking everything, even this, and owning it. Looking again and seeing something new.

Where I was waiting for her final message, the last thing she wanted to tell me: No one understands. I’ll miss you. Forgive me.

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.

Maybe the silence between us was better after all. Because the things we had to say were going to slide to places neither of us wanted to go.

But people must’ve realized what I too soon understood: that grief did not create anything that had not existed before. It only heightened what was already there.

Someone out there on the bluffs with her. Arguing. Pushing her, maybe. The phone falling on the rocks in the process, shattering. The other person picking it up, coming to the party, hiding her phone when the police arrived. Someone who had been at the party after all. Someone who could’ve slipped out and come back with no one knowing.

Obsession was the gravity that kept you in orbit, a force you were continually spiraling toward, even when you were looking away.

Buy your house and keep you here. Fund your education, direct you in kind. Employ you, monitor you, mold your path. My home is your home. Your life is my life. There will be no locks or secrets here.

I’M SORRY. I WISH it didn’t have to be this way. Two simple sentences. The note they found. Crumpled in the trash.

What were the odds that Sadie had chosen those very same words, the ones I had used earlier that summer—the ones I had written myself, folded in half, and left on the surface of her desk for her?

Why the note matched her diary. Why the diary gave the police pause. I hadn’t seen this in years. The familiar, angry pen indentations on the cover, the tattered corners, the blackened edges.

The note matched the journal perfectly, yes. Because they were both mine.

Detective Collins paced the room again, the floorboards creaking under his feet. “If I had to make a professional assessment, I’d say the friendship was a little one-sided. If I’m being honest with you, it seems a little like you were obsessed with her.”

I set my jaw. Bianca was wrong. She believed I had stolen from their company, taken Sadie’s job, let her take the fall for it, but it wasn’t true.

I summarized the details, passed them along to Grant, didn’t say what I knew to be true: If it wasn’t me, it was Sadie—who was technically the person in charge. I was many things, but I wasn’t a thief. I would not lose everything I’d worked for because of her misplaced rebellion.

I wasn’t even sure she knew how to apologize, how to feel it. But that was the thing about loving someone—it only counted when you knew their flaws and did it anyway.

In retrospect, that was what I had missed. She wanted out. Out of the Lomans’ grip, out of her life, by any means possible. Out—into the directionless, limitless wild. So she stockpiled the money. And that wasn’t my fault at all. No, the blame could be traced back a few more steps.

“It was a coincidence that we met,” I said. “She walked in on me in the bathroom when I was working. Evelyn hired me.” It was what I’d always believed until Erica told me someone from the Loman house had requested me to work that party. But that didn’t make sense.

Account numbers. Payments. Something she’d felt the need to hide away, outside the reach of all of Littleport. But there wasn’t enough information. No names, no dates. It all meant nothing in a vacuum.

He once told me I had something his own children lacked. 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.

It wasn’t only the routing number that matched. It was the account. One of the account numbers, one of the recipients of this money—it was my grandmother’s.

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.

I pulled up the images from Sadie’s phone—the photos she had taken. The picture of the winding, tree-lined mountain road. And I finally understood what Sadie had uncovered. The thing tying me to the Lomans. The cash payment she had found. It was a payoff for the death of my parents.

The scar through his eyebrow, his own reminder. Not a fight but an accident—Sadie had just figured it out for herself. An accident that he had caused. But Parker Loman was untouchable. Somehow he had gotten away with it. One hundred thousand dollars—the price of my parents’ lives. Given for our continued silence.

Smoke spilled from the top of the garbage can, the air dangerous and alive. “You knew,” I said, stepping back. Detective Ben Collins stood between me and the doorway, not meeting my eye.

“Sadie,” I said, finally understanding. Her flaw was my own—she’d trusted the wrong person. My life was her life. She must’ve taken this same path, landed at his name—and believed he would tell her the truth. “You killed her,” I whispered, hand to my mouth at the truth, at the horror.