OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Read Online Free Page A

Explorer ) on the planter where Adelaide had planned on growing pumpkins this spring. It was full of dry weeds. The eastern sky was cloudless, bruising purple through scraggly trees. My breath curled in the porch light. It was cold enough out here to kill you, but it would take a while.
    I led Holden up the steps and inside.
    The security system chirped again: “Front door is ajar.”
    “Where’s the rifle?” he asked.
    I closed the door and made sure it shut all the way. “The kitchen.”
    But Holden hovered there in the foyer, sheepish, like a child in an antique store. I knew the feeling. This was the first time he’d been over since New Year’s.
    Yeah, I still had all of Adelaide’s stuff in our house.
    I didn’t know what to keep or toss, so I just kept everything. I’m told you’re not supposed to rush this part of the process, so in that respect I’m doing just fabulous. At night, the house felt like a museum. Every room had that posed look of a home décor section at Sears. It felt like every surface I touched, I left fingerprints on.
    Holden gingerly pulled off his tennis shoes, right next to Adelaide’s.
    I wanted to explain to him that this was normal — I’d read online that it’s perfectly natural to leave a dead spouse’s belongings in plain view until you’re ready to box them up — but honestly, coming up on three months, it didn’t feel normal. It felt like denial. Or cowardice. I was embarrassed, and I think he was, too.
    But grief is a process. It’s surprising, and a little disturbing, how fast you scab over and grow numb to the major reminders. Her work-issued laptop became part of the coffee table, the battery long dead. Her stupid pet lizard became my stupid pet lizard. Framed photos of our trips to Astoria, Maui, and the Mount St. Helens blast zone ached, but only when you stopped to look at them. After a few weeks, it’s all white noise. You gain some momentum and you think you’re doing okay. Not good, because good is still months away, but okay is a reasonable goal.
    Then last week I opened the fridge and saw her coffee creamer, caramel macchiato, sitting forgotten in the very back. It had gone chunky and sour. For some stupid reason, it was the expired half-quart of her favorite coffee creamer that nearly broke me. The subtle things blindside you like that. All of January, February, and March had been like this, some torturous inner circle of Hell, where you’re forced to tediously rediscover the worst event of your life, over and over, from every oblique angle.
    Like the junk mail. She’s dead, and she gets more mail than I do. A monthly subscription for Exotic Pets, a warranty statement for her latest tablet, a student loan statement. She needs to renew her vehicle tabs in April. Good to know, right? The tedious clockwork of life just sort of grinds on.
    Like Baby, Adelaide’s pet savannah monitor, named after Jennifer Grey’s character from Dirty Dancing . Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a lizard, because lizard implies something small and amiable, like that gecko that sells insurance. Baby was almost five feet long. Let that sink in a moment — Adelaide’s savannah monitor was bigger than some dogs. She’d been our ‘practice-child,’ and now she was my problem; a shambling, bow-legged dinosaur with a serpentine black tongue and a whip-like tail. Every two days I’d feed her a dead mouse (humanely pre-killed) with barbecue tongs and watch her shake it like a pit bull thrashing a chew toy. Then she throws her head back and swallows in these gurgling, goose-like motions. Thank God it was mammals that inherited the earth. That meteorite came just in time.
    Still, during these weekly rituals I’d formed a bit of a grudging bond with Baby. We resented each other, but we both missed Addie. We suffered together, squatting in a house that had become a minefield of freeze-dried memories.
    But the weird part?
    I had never cried for Adelaide. Not once. Not even the night it