7
Julian
Iwalk through Kincaid Castle again when I get home from the fundraiser and take a cold, hard look at the task I have in front of me. It's daunting. The place is in terrible shape. At dinner, I started wondering if I was overstating how bad the mess was. If anything, I was understating things. It’s a disaster.
I've been living here for almost nine months. All that time, I’ve avoided dealing with my house in favor of work. There’s always something else to do. But I can't avoid it any longer, not unless I want to let down my sister. Yet again.
Damien suggested the greenhouse. Instead of drowning in despair at the magnitude of the problem in front of me, I head there and turn on a light switch. Shockingly, it works. Sort of. Weak flickering light illuminates the space in front of me.
Once upon a time, this was my favorite part of the house. It was always warm, even in the dead of winter. Tropical plants filled the area. Glass panes let in sunlight, and the air was scented with the fragrance of hundreds of flowers. Potted orange trees grew here when the ground outside was covered in snow, and golden koi darted in a pond dotted with lotus blossoms.
Hannah and I would come down here to feed the fish when we were young. I even had a pet turtle, Harry. To me and Hannah, the greenhouse, or the conservatory, as my parents liked to call it, was a place of refuge. My mother occasionally tended to the plants, but my father never bothered. Here, it was just the two of us.
I can’t romanticize the past. Hannah's memories of this place are undoubtedly very different from mine.
But it wasn't just Hannah who was unhappy. Even as a child, I could see the disparity in how we were treated. Children have an innate sense of fair play. I knew it was wrong, and it bothered me, and I didn't know how to change things.
My turtle is long-dead. The pots are cracked and broken, and the plants are withered husks. The glass panes are filthy and caked with dirt. Some of them are cracked, and some have shattered, letting in air from the outside. The glass roof is wrecked. The floor is covered with a moth-eaten carpet and littered with debris.
I don't have to be a therapist to understand why I haven't done a damn thing to fix Kincaid Castle. Restoring it to its former grandeur seems wrong somehow. As if I’m putting a glossy veneer over our childhood.
If it were up to me, I'd let the place fall apart. But Hannah wants to get married here, which means I need to push past my emotions and do this for my sister.
I look around at the mess. This is going to take a lot of time. I need to keep searching for a contractor, but I can't rely on finding one. My initial search hasn’t yielded any results, and I can't afford to wait much longer. I need to get started.
I kneel down and roll the faded carpet aside. There's terracotta tile underneath, the tile I remember from my childhood. Under-floor heating kept the tiles warm, even on the coldest days of the year. I remember my father saying something about it in one of our rare phone conversations. He put down the carpet because the heating had stopped working.
I pull out my phone and start to make a list of all the things I’ll have to do. The under-floor heating needs to be fixed, as does the plumbing since Hannah’s wedding guests will need hot water in the bathrooms. I need to replace the broken panes of glass. The roof needs attention, as does the pond. And, if I manage to get all of that done, I’ll need to buy plants to fill the space.
One thing at a time. The tile floor is the first thing to tackle. I need to go to a hardware store as soon as I wake up tomorrow.
I workon the greenhouse all of Sunday and most of Monday morning. I make very slow progress. It takes me all of that time to just clean the place up. I make five trips to the dump.
And I try not to think about Sophia. About the night we spent together. About what might have been, if only we hadn’t lost touch.
But it’s impossible to scrub her from my thoughts. Seeing her at the fundraiser has torn the veil and yanked the memories back to the forefront. When I met Sophia, Kingdom Night, one of my comics, had just become a runaway bestseller. Meander Games paid me a six-figure advance to storyboard their upcoming video game. My career was taking off.
There were many wins that year. Even so, that night with her was the best night of my life. That night, real-life was on pause, and the air was alive with magic.
Then everything went to shit. My mother received her cancer diagnosis. I told her to call Hannah. “She would want to know,” I said. “She would want to help.” Of course, my parents wouldn’t hear of it. There had been arguments. So many appointments with so many doctors. Oncologists. Specialists. Chemo. My father broke his leg, and he couldn’t put any weight on it for three months. Caring for both of them fell to me.
I tried to hold onto Sophia. I desperately wanted to see her again. But when I called her, she wouldn’t answer the phone. She wouldn’t return my texts. I got the message. She wasn’t interested in staying in touch, and even though I didn’t understand why, I needed to respect her decision. So I let her go.
I should have gone up and said hello to her at the fundraiser. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe it was the sense that if I did, she would upend my life again.
Or maybe I didn’t talk to her for the same reason I’ve avoided Hannah. I like to steer clear of hard conversations and difficult, inconvenient emotions.
Shaun Zhao,my agent, calls me Monday afternoon. “Are you sitting down?” he asks, his voice vibrating with excitement. “Because I have news.”
I've managed to vacuum up most of the dirt, but the floor’s certainly not in any condition to sit on. There’s not a chair in sight either. Not that it matters; Shaun’s question had been rhetorical.
“What's going on?”
“Levine Entertainment has bought the film rights to Revenant.”
Revenantis a comic I made four years ago. It’s set in a magic-friendly, post-apocalyptic world and is my biggest hit to date. It was made into a wildly popular game, and I’ve attended conventions where women cosplay as my protagonist Lola. People write fanfic about her, shipping her with Cavuto, the assassin who’s hired to kill her.
Hollywood has expressed interest in the comic before, but nothing’s come of it. Until now.