Amelia Allen feels stuck.
To an outsider, her life must look beautiful. She has a steady job, a relationship, and several years of her twenties left to figure out what more she wants out of life. But nothing is as shimmery as it appears from the su...
The orange orb of the sun had begun to illuminate the sky, peeking around tree branches like light streaming out from beyond a cracked door, but the world went colder once Amelia and Henry were completely under the cover of the evergreens. Everything was darker here, dark enough that her eyes could play tricks on her, that she could start to believe that massive, shadowy specters were looming over them instead if she let herself dwell on it for more than a fraction of a second.
She watched her breath fog in the air in front of her. She watched the compass on her phone, steering them in the right direction—just because she'd come to Hollow House before unfortunately didn't mean that she'd taken the time to stomp through all of the adjacent woods just in case she'd ever need to know her way around. She felt Henry's hand holding hers, the only fragment of warmth for what felt like miles even though she knew that they were barely out of sight of the car.
They were treading as lightly as they could; fortunately, the piles of dead pine needles were much quieter beneath their boots than crunchy fallen leaves would have been. They weren't even close enough to the house yet to be in any danger of being heard, but there was no such thing as being too cautious at the present moment.
"Henry?" she whispered, shifting closer to his side when the sudden scuttling noise of a squirrel running down a tree trunk nearby made her heart jump in her chest.
"Amelia Rose," he whispered back, nearly smiling.
"Thank you for going along with my crazy ideas..." she swallowed. "I'm...I'm so sorry if I'm misleading us. If I let you down."
He faltered, his steps slowing just slightly. "You couldn't let me down, not if you tried. You've done way more to try to help her than anyone ever would have asked of you."
He held her hand a little tighter as if trying to put an end to the conversation, to say without words that he didn't want to hear her protest his point. Now wasn't the time for second-guessing, not when they were mere strides away from Hollow House. Amelia realized that she could already see the treeline ahead, which would open up into the field behind the house.
If there was anything else she wanted to say to Henry, now was the time to say it.
Her mouth was dry, her pulse pounding in her ears, and she gripped his hand harder to stop him. She looked up at his face, at the lovely blue of his eyes and the flush that had risen on his cheeks from the cold air, and realized that there was so much she hadn't said.
"If something goes wrong in there..."
"Don't say that. We can't afford to think like that."
Amelia exhaled through her nose. "Alright," she said thinly. "I just–"
Rather than finish speaking, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him, slipping her phone into her back pocket so that she could lift that hand to the contour of his cheek instead. For just a moment, just one more moment, she needed to forget where she ended and he began. She wasn't ready to relinquish him to whatever waited for them inside, not yet.
"Don't," he eventually breathed, the rhythm uneven. "Don't be like that and kiss me like it's the last time you're going to."
"It's not." One last swift kiss on his lips. "It's for good luck."
"For good luck," he murmured back.
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