If I hadn’t been so young and desperate, I might’ve thought more about how it all looked—how, to minds as poisoned and suspicious as Howell’s and Nelle’s, covering up Ruby’s suicide would make me look like I had something to hide. So it hadn’t been a surprise, that sly, ugly sentence there at the end of his email—Do you ever think about it, Camden?—but it had landed like a weight in my chest all the same.
When I’d gotten my lawyer’s voicemail last month, telling me Howell had driven drunk straight into a tree not far from Ashby House, I hadn’t been surprised. There had been dozens of smaller accidents like that with him, god knows how many cars crumpled, but Howell had always walked away.
Until he didn’t.
I hadn’t told Jules about the call, Howell’s death, any of it. I’d planned on just ignoring it like I did all things Ashby House, but Ben’s message … I don’t know. It got to me.
He was right—he and I had never gotten along as kids. He was a couple of years older than me, and knowing that his family fortune was being left to some skinny kid he wasn’t even related to had not exactly endeared me to him. The Ben I remembered was a preening jock, an asshole who drove a truck that could’ve doubled as a tank and always wore whatever the year’s most expensive sneakers were.
But he’d sounded different in that email. More … I don’t know. Human. Like someone who wasn’t necessarily the Enemy.
Howell’s email from all those months ago had been easy to ignore, but something about Ben’s gave me pause.
We’d talked late into the night, me and Jules, weighing out the pros （Jules had never seen Ashby House, or North Carolina for that matter; it would be the first trip we’d taken together since that camping trip in Estes Park two summers ago; Ben was right, something needed to be done about the tangled bullshit that was Ruby’s will––all that money, all that house） and the cons （literally, every fucking thing else）。
In the end, it had been Jules who’d made the decision for us. Sitting there at our kitchen table, our fingers intertwined, exhausted in that way you get when you’ve been talking in circles for hours, she’d finally said, “I think we should go.”
I’d watched her, not saying anything, my heart a steady drumbeat in my chest, and then she’d added, almost sheepish, “It might be nice to know you a little better.”
Married ten years, and my own wife feels like she needs to know me better.
I could understand it, though. When I’d left North Carolina for California, I was so closed off, so determined to keep to myself.
It had seemed safest that way. Ashby House had been a crucible and a fishbowl all at once, the sort of place where despite all the rooms and the endless square footage, it was like you were never alone. There was always someone watching, always someone listening, and all I had wanted was to feel invisible. Unseen.
Unknown.
Until Jules. I’d let her in, but I knew—and apparently, she did, too—that there was still some part of me holding back.
Ashby House was the reason for that.
So maybe it could be the solution, too.
After that, things moved fast. Jules quit her job at Homestead Park and pulled out of the local theater production of Chicago, where she’d been cast as Velma. I put in for extended leave at the school. “Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks,” I’d said to the head of the English department, hoping it was true, but knowing it probably wasn’t.
My ninth graders were reading The Odyssey, and just a few weeks ago, we’d gotten to the part about the lotus-eaters, a tribe of people living on an island, gorging themselves with the lotus flowers that make them forget home, forget anything that’s not the island and their fellow lotus-eaters, all of them settling into peaceful, blank apathy.
Ashby House was like that.
Stay there long enough, and you forget there’s a world outside its tall doors, its oversize windows, and shadowed lawns. It swallows everyone eventually. Look at Ben and Libby, for fuck’s sake. Look at Howell.
I barely remembered his ex-wife, Ben and Libby’s mom, Rebecca. She’d taken off early on, when Libby was about five or six, and after that, it was like she had never even existed. Like anyone who left Ashby House had to be erased from the collective memory or something.
But Howell had stayed, and while they’d briefly left for college, both Ben and Libby had drifted back to Ashby eventually. Nelle, of course, had never left. Never would.
Four people rattling around a fifteen-bedroom mansion because the idea of life outside its walls, of buying a smaller place––or, god forbid, renting an apartment like a normal person––was completely unthinkable.