The road into Lakehull ends in white.
Snow, sky, lake—everything is the same blunt shade, as if the world forgot how to do color. My rental car growls in protest as I ease it off the highway and onto the narrow main street, tires crunching over ice. It’s barely four in the afternoon, but the light is already dying.
Evelyn always said this town felt like the end of the map.
The sign I pass now says: WELCOME TO LAKEHULL. POP. 3,204. Someone has scratched a line through the last digit and written a shaky 3 in its place. Cute. Or morbid. I can’t tell.
I grip the steering wheel harder. "Just a week," I mutter. "Pack her things, sign what they need, and go home."
Home. A place that doesn’t exist without her.
The houses crowd closer as I drive in, heavy roofs hunched under snow. Some windows are lit, a soft orange against the pale. It would almost be pretty if the hair at the back of my neck didn’t insist on standing up. People walk along the sidewalks, bundled in thick coats and fur-lined hoods, their breaths puffing into the cold.
Their heads turn as I pass.
It’s not subtle. Faces follow the car like the barrel of a gun, conversations snagging, eyes narrowing. A woman with a grocery bag goes still, knuckles whitening around the handles. A teenager in a beanie stops mid-laugh, his mouth falling open.
My chest tightens. It’s small-town curiosity, I tell myself. Evelyn probably told them a lot about her twin sister. Maybe they see her when they look at me.
I try not to look back at them because they don’t just seem surprised.
They look…expectant.
My phone vibrates in the cupholder. I let it ring. The sheriff’s office number stares up at me, unread.
I’ve been ignoring their calls for three days, ever since the thick envelope arrived with "CONDOLENCES" stamped between legalese and police jargon. Accidental drowning. Cold-water shock. Hypothermia.
Evelyn, who could swim laps around me before we were old enough for real swimsuits.
My throat burns. I blink hard and follow the directions on the GPS. The lake flashes between houses—a broad white plate under a cloud-choked sky, ringed by dark pines. For a heartbeat I think I see someone out on the ice, a dark speck too far from shore, walking where no one should.
I blink again. It’s gone.
The turn for her street appears sooner than I’m ready. Birch Lane: a short dead end of older houses hunched against the cold. Evelyn’s rental is the one at the very end, a two-story with flaking blue paint and a sagging porch that somehow still manages to look…alive. Curtains in the windows. A wreath of twigs and silver ribbon on the door.
She hadn’t been planning to leave.
I pull into the short driveway and kill the engine. The silence roars in the sudden absence of the heater. For a second, I just sit there, fingers locked around the steering wheel, the tick of the cooling engine loud in the quiet.
I’m not ready to open this door and step into the last place she ever lived. I’m not ready to smell her shampoo in the bathroom, or find her mug unwashed by the sink.
But I didn’t drive eight hours to sit in the car.
