The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel - By Sarah Addison Allen Page 0,2

in the foyer, where she had stopped and waited for him to notice her so she wouldn’t startle him. How odd that he was the giant, yet she was the one who felt out of place.

He gave her a cautious look, like she was out to trick him. “Lilacs?”

“You asked what the wallpaper was in Mom’s old room. It’s lilacs.”

“Ah. It was always flowers, usually roses, when she was a little girl. It changed a lot as she got older. I remember once it was lightning bolts on a tar-black background. And then another time it was this scaly blue color, like a dragon’s belly. She hated that one, but couldn’t seem to change it.”

That made Emily smile. “That doesn’t sound like her at all. I remember once …” She stopped when Vance looked away. He didn’t want to know. The last time he saw his daughter was twenty years ago. Wasn’t he even curious? Stung, Emily turned away from him. “I guess I’ll go to bed now.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked as he followed her at a distance. “I went to the grocery store this morning. I bought some teenager food.”

She reached the first step on the staircase and turned, which made him step back suddenly. “Thank you. But I really am tired.”

He nodded. “All right. Tomorrow, maybe.”

She went back to the bedroom and fell onto the bed. Mustiness exploded from the mattress. She stared at the ceiling. Moths had come in, attracted to the light, and they were hopping around the cobwebby chandelier. Her mother had grown up with a chandelier in her bedroom? This from the same woman who would lecture Emily if she left a light on in a room she wasn’t using.

She reached over and pulled some of her clothes from the floor and buried her face in them. They smelled familiar, like her mother’s incense. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to cry. It was too early to say this was a bad decision. And even if it was, there was nothing she could do about it. She could survive a year here, surely.

She heard the wind skittering dried leaves around the balcony, something she realized sounded remarkably like someone walking around out there. She moved the clothes from her face and turned her head to look out the open balcony doors.

The light from the bedroom illuminated the closest treetops in the backyard, but their limbs weren’t swaying. She sat up and crawled off the bed. Once outside, she looked around carefully. “Is anyone here?” she called, not knowing what she would do if someone actually answered.

Something suddenly caught her eye. She quickly stepped to the balustrade. She thought she saw something in the woodline beyond the gazebo in the overgrown backyard.

There! There it was again. It was a bright white light—a quick, zippy flash—darting between the trees. Gradually, the light faded, moving back into the darkness of the woods until it disappeared completely.

Welcome to Mullaby, North Carolina, she thought. Home of ghost lights, giants, and jewelry thieves.

She turned to go back in and froze.

There, on the old metal patio table, sitting on top of a layer of dried leaves, was her mother’s charm bracelet.

Where it hadn’t been just minutes ago.

TOO MUCH wine.

That’s what Julia would blame it on.

When she saw Stella in the morning, she would say, “Oh, and that thing I said about Sawyer last night, forget it. It was just the wine talking.”

As Julia made her way up to her apartment that evening, she felt vaguely panicked and not at all mellow—as summer wine on the back porch with Stella usually made her. She only had six months before she was free of this town again, six months that were supposed to be easy, the downhill slope of her two-year plan. But with one tiny slip of the tongue, she’d just made things infinitely harder on herself. If what she said got back to Sawyer, he wouldn’t let it rest. She knew him too well.

She opened the door at the top of the staircase and stepped into the narrow hallway. Nothing had been done to the upper story of Stella’s house to make it look like an apartment. There were four doors off the hallway. One led to the bathroom, one to Julia’s bedroom, one to a second bedroom that had been converted into a kitchen, and another to a tiny third bedroom that Julia used as a living room.

Years ago, after Stella’s ex-husband had spent his way through Stella’s