Heart the Mountain Keeps

Prologue

The light above the sink went out, and Addison Grasso stopped moving until it came back. She had been watching the narrow gap beneath the bathroom door when the room disappeared around her; now the green tiles returned in sections, the bulb flickering twice before settling into its uneven hum. Nothing had changed, but she pulled her feet closer to herself and tightened her arm around Squeezems.

The floor was cold through her clothes. A smell rose from the drain whenever she shifted, and a damp patch near the toilet had spread far enough that she could no longer pretend she was sitting beside it rather than in it. She kept her father's diary on her knees, holding its edges above the floor. There was nowhere clean to put the book, and she had already lost too much to let its pages become another thing she could not save.

She was twelve years old, alone behind an Esso station in Abercrombie, and hungry enough that her stomach no longer felt empty so much as angry. Fourteen hours earlier, she had found three newspaper clippings. She knew approximately how long it had been because, at first, she had kept remembering the clock she had looked at before opening them. Since then, the numbers had begun slipping away. What remained was the print, the names, and the terrible feeling of recognizing something she should never have had to recognize.

Anna was not the name in the papers. The woman Addison called her aunt had another name, and the other name belonged to a story she had spent her whole childhood not knowing. Darcell Neveaux had existed before Anna Grasso, before the house and the ordinary arguments and the voice telling her not to leave her things on the stairs. Addison had read about her father until the words became something she could not unread.

“You're not my aunt,” she whispered, then caught herself looking toward the door as though the woman might have heard.