Excerpt from The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Probably what she was trying to ask me in the car, but I wouldn't have told her anyway. She doesn't need more things to worry about. "What's up with the windows?"

Trish leans against the doorframe. "It made her feel better."

So did turning a blind eye when Dad locked me out of the house. "I'm not staying if I'm going to die in my sleep from breathing in chemicals, no matter how much the inheritance is."

"I'll get a fan in here. We might sell this place soon anyway."

"Oh, so now you're a 'we'?" I sound like a whiny kid again, but I can't help myself.

Trish's mouth purses. "I ran into Mason a couple weeks ago. He asked how you were doing." She pauses. "He's always asking."

I have the renewed urge to jump out the window, sealant or not. Trish eyes me. I fill in the rest: You should have texted him. You could have at least sent a letter; you know how he is about letters. You could have at least waited until his girlfriend—Our neighbor! Your best friend! The girl you were secretly pathetically in love with!—was in the ground before you ditched town.

"I didn't know you guys talked."

"I saw the four of you grow up."

"And then there were two."

Trish looks tired of me. It's such a Mom look. How do I deal with Isa today? Once, Trish would've known how to instantly make everything better, and part of me wants to believe that magic still exists.

But she just says, "You've had a long day, Isa. Take a shower."

"Close the door!" I yell as she exits.

She rolls her eyes but pulls it shut behind her.

I sink onto the mattress, where the pillow still has the faint dent of my head. I can't imagine this place ever selling. Every floorboard and wall is knotted with crying girls, secrets, and starving vermin. I imagine a contractor ripping down the wallpaper to find them crawling on the underside: knife-eyed rats in death throes, women on their knees clawing at the fleur-de-lis, their limbs contouring out the stripes. I used to think I heard their voices sometimes, slipping out the edges and becoming garbled. But then I realized it was probably just Mom, talking to herself in a language I don't understand.

More likely, this house will just become another abandoned building in this town, taken back over by the vines. Better that way. The rock irises might be able to give it the color we never could.

Forgotten Places. If I can focus and draw, Slater should theoretically be perfect.

* * *

When I've scrubbed off the long drive in scalding water, I finally pull out my portfolio folder. I haven't opened it since the showcase. Now the cord bites at my fingers as I unwind it; the plastic crackles as I pull the cover open.

The canvas backs are all the same scratchy off-white, blasphemously folded into quarters, but my fingers gravitate toward one portrait that I spread out on the bed. The pallid face unfurls in the falling dusk. Air whistles—distant wind through some crack in Mom's sealant, or else breath through my teeth.

I used to take stoneworking lessons at the Vandersteens' sculpture workshop, but I started in pencils and it's still my primary medium. Graphite is cheap and dark. It can suggest entire worlds just with the contrast of negative space. Like this:

The girl is lying half-buried, roots winding through her skin. Pale skin, paler hair. She smiles vacantly at the sky, and it would be almost peaceful, if her neck wasn't slanted at a forty-five- degree angle. This was the first piece I unveiled at my showcase a few days ago, one portrait out of four that I don't remember creating at all.

It's a dead Paige Vandersteen.

Who's now missing.

Across the bare garden, Wren Carver's curtains flutter like wide lashes, and an ancient song rolls in from the valleys.

The rich dark tremor shudders softly through me, and thoughts flicker up in its echo: Wren, and then Zach—and then Mason Kane, out there somewhere at the center of them all, and the only remaining person alive outside of this house who once truly knew me.

Excerpted from The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee. Copyright © 2024 by Wen-yi Lee. Excerpted by permission of Zando. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.