This isn't weird.

Boxes

Millie had forgotten just how much she hated driving on gravel roads. Her little car rattled cantankerously over the unending bumps, and began to slide over the rocks any time she attempted to drive over twenty miles per hour. The noise was loud and grating, and the endless clouds of dust kicked up by her tires became quickly plastered to her windshield by the humidity.

The humidity. And the heat. It wasn't even summer yet.

Molly would be under observation at the hospital for a few more days. Tess was gone; Millie had dropped her off at the airport that morning. Now she reluctantly made the hours-long trek to the place she most desperately wanted to never see again. The house would need to be prepared for Molly's return, and she had no idea exactly what that would entail. It had been a solid decade since she had been there.

Her hometown wasn't even a town. The area was unincorporated, and once she had passed through the puny blip of civilization that was Dewberry Creek, she drove for miles down twisting, narrow gravel roads where the only sign of human life was the shambling network of telephone poles occasionally visible through the trees.

She missed her road twice. The street sign was gone, no doubt the victim of bored, drunk teenagers who felt as trapped by the boundless nothingness of this godforsaken backwoods hellscape as she herself had all those years ago. When she finally found it, it was no surprise that she hadn't spotted it before. It was all but washed away by time, the forest encroaching steadily closer had narrowed it to maybe eight feet across at its widest points.

As she turned onto it, the car skidded once more over loose gravel, and Millie wondered darkly how long it would be before anyone would find her if she were to wrap her car around one of these trees. Days, maybe weeks. Maybe never.

A full mile down the road, the trees thinned out until only a few stately oaks loomed over an otherwise clear acre of land. The decrepit little eyesore her family had called a home was set thirty or so yards back from the road, partially surrounded by a ramshackle wood and wire fence that stopped abruptly somewhere on the left side, as if the builder had simply lost interest. In her memory, the house was a rotting shack held together by duct tape and spite, and her memory, for the most part, was reliable. The only difference was that a sturdy, oversized wooden deck had sprung up in front of it. It looked strange juxtaposed against the peeling paint and torn up door screen, completely out of place. Millie related so hard to a porch.

What did come as a surprise were the improvements to the landscape. A quaint brick walkway now snaked through the yard, forming a scenic path from the gravel driveway to the patio. Halfway up the path, climbing yellow rose bushes scaled the length of a latticed arch, marking the beginning of a trail of stepping stones that led to a tiny wooden bridge over a little pond. Curiosity piqued, Millie approached it for a closer look. The pond was unexpectedly ornate, ringed with mossy flagstones that built up on one end into a steadily bubbling little waterfall, with lily pads floating and its surface, and—wait, was that a fish? Millie squinted. Were there actual fish in this pond?

Bizarre.

She could remember her father starting all of these projects—he was always starting projects, sinking money they didn't have into tools and building materials, digging things up and tearing things down in random bursts of manic energy—but he almost never finished them. When she had left, this had just been a muddy trench haphazardly splattered with concrete that had sat untouched for years. The idea that he might actually finish it would never have occurred to her in a million years.

Then it hit her, a realization both searing and cold. Mom had died first. She and Molly had virtually disappeared. Those last five years, it had just been him, all alone in that squalid house...