And she was dying. Had to be. That horrible ache returned to his stomach. He was going to lose Brenna as soon as he’d found out his feelings for her. Damn, fate was cruel. “Oh Brenna. Just tell me.” Tell me fast, so we can rip the Band-Aid off the wound and enjoy the rest of the time we have together.
She looked so distraught that it broke his heart. But she tugged at his hand. “I have to show you something.”
Shit, shit, shit.
As she sat up in bed, he realized she was wearing her pajamas. His pajamas, actually—flannel plaid pants that were double-knotted at her slender waist and his favorite Tulane T-shirt. But it wasn’t like Brenna to sleep clothed. She liked to sleep na**d and be curled around him. Which meant that she’d already gotten out of bed once, likely to prepare whatever it was that she wanted to show him.
That sick feeling in the hollow of his stomach felt like a black hole.
But she tugged at his hand insistently and, heart aching, he crawled out of their warm bed and followed her. He should have put on a pair of pants or boxers or something, but he needed to find out what was causing that look of anguish on her face first.
They descended down the ladder in silence, and he noticed his personal laptop had been fired up and was sitting on a video page. She tugged at his hand again, leading him toward the computer. Mystified, he sat down when she gestured for him to and tried to pull her into his lap.
But she resisted, her entire body tense. Instead, she leaned over him and clicked the mouse to start the video.
An ad played on screen, and Brenna’s body vibrated with tension beside him. He scanned the Internet page, wondering what she was going to show him. Some sort of video describing fatal diseases? A home movie of some kind? But the video page had been put up years ago and had thousands of hits. The header read “S1 EP 14—the Atlees,” but he didn’t know what that meant.
All he knew was that it was going to somehow destroy Brenna to show him, and in the process, it’d destroy him, too. He loved her. He loved her wild exuberance and hated her tears. He tried to pull her close again, but still she resisted.
Theme music began to play, tinny through the laptop speakers, and he heard Brenna’s breath intake sharply. Drawing his attention back to the screen, he watched the credits of one of those hour-long special reporting news shows roll past. A solemn news anchor in a gray suit sat on a stool next to a screen that read “Special Investigation: 2004.”
“Thank you for joining us tonight,” the man said in a deep voice, “as we continue our series on a growing problem in America. Is this a disease? Something inherently wrong with certain people’s minds that causes them to react differently than you or I? Or something else that forces these people to act the way they do?” He adjusted on his stool, gazing at the camera, and Grant thought his heart was going to burst from his chest in sheer anxiety.
What the f**k was it, already? He couldn’t take much more of this. His mind was full of horrible images of Brenna suffering. Brenna stricken by disease.
“This is an epidemic that is sweeping through many homes in the nation. As high as one in ten families can be affected. It destroys lives and everything it touches. We’re talking, of course, about . . . hoarding.”
Huh?
Hoarding?
Brenna wasn’t dying? He wasn’t going to lose her like he lost Heather? Relief washed over him, so powerful that he couldn’t help himself.
He laughed.
Next to him, Brenna gave a horrified gasp and a choked sob. Before he could react, she reached out and slapped him in the face, then turned and ran for the front door.
“No, Brenna, wait—” Grant said, getting to his feet. Damn it, he didn’t have any pants on. She was wearing his pants.
“Fuck you, Grant. Just f**k you!” Brenna slammed the door to the cabin after her.
Hell, he had to follow her. Explain that he wasn’t laughing at hoarding—though it was absurd to think she was upset about it—but at his own wild relief that she wasn’t dying of some mysterious disease. He searched the room for a blanket, but found nothing. Cursing, he headed for the ladder, intending to head up to his loft and grab a pair of pants.
A high-pitched voice from the computer stopped him.
“I don’t know when it started,” Brenna’s voice said. It was high and girlish and held a troubled note. “Our house has been like this for as long as I can remember. I grew up surrounded by bags and boxes full of stuff.”
Grant turned back to the computer. There on the screen was a much younger Brenna. Her face was skinny and her hair was long and untamed, a lighter, almost golden brown compared to the much darker waves she wore today. She wore a dirty T-shirt and hugged her arms to her chest, as if acutely uncomfortable. There was a look of shame on her face that he didn’t recognize.
The Brenna he knew wasn’t like this.
“Brenna Atlee,” the reporter said, and Grant was startled to realize that he knew her under a different name, “has lived under the shadow of hoarding all her life. Her mother, Agatha Atlee, is a hoarder. Her mother before her? A hoarder.”
Drawn back to the computer despite himself, Grant sat down in the chair. He knew he should have gone after Brenna, but the vulnerable, unhappy girl in the video had him riveted. He couldn’t pull himself away.
The camera cut to the front door of a small ranch-style house in a run-down neighborhood. Brenna stood on the porch, her hand on a beat-up doorknob. There were large chips of paint missing from the red door, and a nearby window showed broken mini-blinds. She looked as if she wanted to run away. He’d seen that look on Brenna’s face this morning. Then, with a nod, Brenna opened the door to the house.
Grant watched in horror as she pushed at the front door, shoving at it to get it to open enough to allow her in. She glanced back at the camera. “Watch your step when you come in,” she said, then began to step over piles of trash and boxes of junk to make her way into the house.
“Every inch of the Atlee house is covered in garbage,” the narrator intoned, and the camera showed the reporter trying to follow Brenna into the house and having difficulty scaling the garbage. Teenage Brenna held aside a shopping bag of junk and assisted the reporter into a clear space in the house. “Every room of this eighteen-hundred-square-foot house is filled, top to bottom, with things. The room we’re standing in is the foyer. Brenna Atlee says her mother filled this room up last, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. Boxes and bags of clothing, dishes, holiday gifts, and even the neighbor’s garbage line the narrow walls of this cozy house.”