The Search for Lily Myers ✓

05 | Devil's Advocate

Five Months Ago

On her initial visit to Hollow House, Amelia's first thought was that she would be perfectly content to never step foot there again.

On paper, it sounded endearing—built by Colton's great-great-grandparents, it was an old, five-bedroom manor situated in the countryside less than an hour out of town. But the reality of it was much bleaker. They had to drive down a half-mile-long gravel road just to get there; the grounds were completely overgrown, teeming with weeds. The nickname Hollow House could be attributed less to the fact that the bordering creek was called Hickory Hollow Creek and more so to the way that strange noises always seemed to be eerily echoing from inside the walls. She certainly couldn't imagine ever sleeping a night in there.

There was also that minor detail where the whole reason he'd inherited this house in the first place was due to his parents' rather untimely deaths six years ago. They were on a two-week vacation out in the Alaskan wilderness when their charter plane went down; he had stayed behind because he didn't want to spend his summer somewhere cold.

Understandably, he didn't like to talk about it.

Once they had actually crossed the creaky threshold, Amelia could envision how this place had been charming once upon a time. It was barely inhabitable now—a shell of a house, really—but the lower floor was spacious. Dust motes gathered on an untouched fireplace and the exteriors of the windows were grimy, but nothing seemed to have lost much of its structural integrity.

"So...you want to fix it up?" she asked reluctantly.

She didn't want to bring up the glaringly obvious fact that it would probably make more sense to let someone else do the repair work for him, make a decent penny off of selling it, and then purchase something much more practical. She had no idea what it was like to come from old money—after all, her mom was a first-grade teacher and her dad was a security guard—but tried to respect that he might feel as though this was the last thread tying him to his parents and previous generations of his family long gone.

"I was thinking we could try to tackle it in phases," he said. She bristled at his use of we and prayed he wasn't going to drag her too deep into this. "The guys and I were thinking we could turn the attic into a production studio–"

"You want to make your music out here?" she interjected. "In the middle of nowhere, forty-five minutes from your job and your apartment?" And from me.

"Well, yeah. It's getting pretty annoying to constantly have someone complaining about us making noise—out here, it's not like there are any neighbors around to get pissed off at us."

Slowly, Amelia nodded. She supposed that was fair, and if Colton's friends were going to be in and out of this place, that was all the more reason for her not to show up. The dust was making her nose itch and she was holding back a sneeze the entire time he showed her around the main two floors.

It was so much space, more than she would have known what to do with. "...What are you wanting to do with the rest of it?"

He shrugged, but it seemed slightly forced, as though he actually already had a detailed vision for every single room and just didn't want to let it on to her yet.

"Well, that's still a long way away, but once I get this place into shape, I think it'd be a good place to settle down. Have a family. It's really not that far from town and there's so much land to run around on–"

"Ah," was all that came out of Amelia's mouth. She had zoned out as soon as he said family, her mouth suddenly dry.

Of course he was thinking about a family—he'd be thirty in another year's time, so he probably didn't want to wait around forever. She should have expected something like this to come up, but she hadn't expected it so soon, and now she had no clue how to say that she wasn't even sure that she ever wanted to be a mother. Or at least that she didn't want to have to think about that decision any time in the near future.