The dust in the crawlspace was thick and ancient, clinging to Corrine’s lungs like the very secrets that built the house. She moved on hands and knees, the narrow passage pressing in on her from all sides. To anyone else, it would have been a claustrophobic nightmare, but to a girl who had spent every waking second under the watchful gaze of Malcolm or the cold eyes of Olivia, the darkness felt like a cloak of invisibility. It was the only place in the world where she wasn't being watched.
The passage sloped downward, a hidden artery that bypassed the grand staircases and the locked mahogany doors. As she crawled, the silence of the attic was replaced by the living sounds of the mansion—the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock, the distant hiss of the pipes, and the low, mournful sigh of the wind through the eaves.
She reached a section where the wood was thin, and the smell of lavender and antiseptic wafted through the cracks. She pressed her eye to a knot-hole.
Below her was a room she had never seen. It was clinical and cold, filled with white linens and the heavy scent of illness. There, lying in a bed that looked too large for her frail frame, was Alicia. Her mother.
Corrine’s breath hitched. She had seen Alicia every day in the attic, but from this angle—from above, through the skeleton of the house—Alicia looked different. She looked like a broken bird, her golden hair spread across the pillow like spilled silk. She was staring at a small window, the same way Corrine did, but her eyes held no hope, only a vast, echoing emptiness.
"I'm here," Corrine whispered, her voice no louder than a draft.
Alicia didn't move. She couldn't hear. The walls of Foxworth Hall were designed to keep voices in, but they were even better at keeping the truth out....