Kylie Cantrall's Arc

Chapter 8 of 78

Kylie left the island at dusk and drove home with the kitten asleep on the passenger seat. Friday was two days away. The living room was ready. The piano bench had blank paper on it. The fear was smaller than the door. But when she walked past the piano, she saw the bench and knew something was missing. Arianna would sit there first. Kylie wanted a gift waiting on the keys. Not a bouquet. Not the pink love-potion bottle a stranger had mailed her. Something that said I know you. She opened every drawer in the manor. She pulled scarves off a shelf and put them back. She held up a bracelet a stylist had left behind and set it down. Everything in the house had come from somebody else, or from a store, or from a photo shoot. A store-bought gift would land on the piano like a paid apology. Arianna had waited a year with nothing. A generic token would cheapen the day. Kylie sat on the piano bench with the kitten in her lap. She thought about what Arianna had actually given her. A letter. A phone number. A puppy on a floor. A song written across a year. All of it made by hand. She went upstairs to her closet safe. Inside, behind the passports, sat a red box her grandmother had left her the winter she died. A gold heart on a thin chain, small flowers etched into the face. Kylie had never worn it. She had been saving it for a person, not an occasion. She carried the box downstairs and stopped at the lace-curtained window. The night was full dark now, house lights burning across the hill. She opened the box on the sill and looked at the heart under the lamp. It was too much. It was also exactly right. A store gift would have said thank you for coming. This said stay. She found a sheet of the blank paper on the piano and wrote four lines. She named the woman the necklace came from. She wrote that the flowers on the heart were the ones her grandmother grew by the kitchen door. She wrote that she had waited to give it to a person who would not walk out. She signed her name. She folded the note under the red ribbon and set the box on the middle C of the piano. The kitten jumped up and sniffed the bow, then curled beside it. Kylie did not move the kitten. The bench looked like an invitation now, not a schedule. She turned off the lamp. Two days. The gift was chosen. The words were written. Whatever Arianna did with them on Friday, Kylie would not be handing her something borrowed from a stranger. She would be handing her the one thing in the house that had always been hers to give.