“All right, then.”
We strode up the steps and Tristan shoved the door. It let out a loud, painful squeal as it swung open. It wasn’t until I stepped inside the cool, shadowy, empty house that I realized I’d actually imagined what it might be like inside. In my mind’s eye I’d seen antique chairs set up around an ancient card table. I’d imagined lace doilies placed over the backs of upholstered sofas, a faded chintz rug, a fireplace decorated with knickknacks and framed portraits of grandchildren. Instead, what greeted me was a whole lot of nothing. The walls were gray and bare, the fireplace boarded up, and the only furniture on the first floor was a plain white desk, set up right in the center of the living room.
“Let’s go up,” Tristan said quietly.
I held on to the worn banister as I followed him up the stairs to the room that faced Darcy’s. Here we found three white wicker chairs with faded and stained cushions, all of them facing the windows. I pushed a curtain aside and looked out. Darcy lay back on her four-poster bed, holding a magazine at arm’s length up over her face. The view was so perfect I could see her blink.
“Wow,” I said. “This is just—”
“Creepy?” Tristan supplied.
“Yeah,” I said, turning away from the window.
“Maybe we should—”
Instead of finishing his sentence, he undid the faded tieback on the first curtain, and the fabric fell across the window, blocking the view of my house. Then he did the same with the other two windows, tossing the tiebacks onto the floor and casting us in relative darkness.
“I’m sorry,” Tristan said finally. “It’s just…it’s what we do.”
I tried to think back to all the times I’d been on the front porch or in Darcy’s room. Tried to remember what he and his friends might have seen.
“What’s the point?” I asked finally.
He seemed startled. “What do you mean?”
&
nbsp; “I mean what’s the point?” I asked, extending my hand toward the covered windows. “What’s the point of all the watching?”
“Oh.” He chuckled, as if relieved. He gently rested his hands on the back of one of the wicker chairs. “We have to keep an eye on the visitors. We have to interact with them, because we’re integral in sending them where they need to go.”
A cold gush of fear crashed over me. “Wait a minute. You said you don’t decide where people end up.”
“We don’t,” Tristan replied.
“So what does that mean?” I asked. “How are you integral?”
He chewed on his bottom lip and looked up at the plaster ceiling, crisscrossed with cracks. “It’s a little hard to explain, but basically, everything we see, everything we hear…it all goes into the ultimate decision.”
“Do you have to write a report or something?” I asked, resting my hands on the chair across from his.
“No. Nothing like that,” Tristan said with a short laugh. “The information we gather, it just goes where it needs to be.”
“So what you’re saying is, you’re telepathic,” I said.
He shrugged, tilting his head to one side. “Kind of. We all are.”
“And you send telepathic messages to who? God?” I asked, almost laughing at the absurdity of the concept. Fortunately, though, I managed to hold my tongue. I didn’t want to offend him.
“I don’t actually know,” Tristan said. “I’ve tried never to ask that question.”
“How could you never ask that question?” I blurted out, my grip tightening on the back of the chair. “That’s the single most important question there is! Why are we here? Why are we doing all this? If I’m going to be someone’s eyes and ears, I’d kind of like to know who that someone is.”
“I don’t ask that question, Rory, because I’ll never get an answer,” Tristan said, his voice reaching a point very close to anger, a point I’d never seen him approach before.
I looked down at the floor, my face burning. “Oh.”
Clearly this was a topic of some frustration to him as well. Only he’d been dealing with it for a very long time. I turned away from him and stepped over to the window. With one finger, I moved the curtain an inch to the side, looking out at my house, our house, the last house my sister, my father, and I would ever live in together, and my chest felt full. My eyes prickled and I gulped in a breath.