Yeah, I’m still sticking with the haunted house theme. I can’t help it. It hasn’t steered me wrong yet. And We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough was no exception.
We start with Emily and her husband, Freddie, moving from their London flat to a country home called Larkin Lodge. Freddie believes this will be a fresh start for them so that Emily can recover from a coma after a horrible fall in Ibiza.
Emily feels so strange in this house, though it’s downright gorgeous. There are creaks, books fall from shelves, fires go out, writing appears on the bathroom mirror, and she feels a presence on the third floor. But she’s also still dealing with recovery, and some of the post-sepsis symptoms include hallucinations. Is this all in her head? Can she believe anything she sees or hears?
After doing some digging, though, there seemed to be a murder in the house – though the person who was murdered lived. How can that be? And her and Freddie’s relationship isn’t doing so well either. They seem to be on and off emotionally. They’ll have good days, but Larkin Lodge seems to bring out the worst in both of them. And a lot of heated arguments continue when Emily finds out Freddie has gambled away nearly everything they had. She also isn’t sure if Freddie didn’t push her off that cliff. Hell, even Freddie didn’t seem sure!
Well, Emily’s research leads her to conclude that someone she now knows as a good friend from their new small town was indeed murdered in that house. And after being placed on the third floor, she miraculously recovered. Only the ‘bad’ parts of her, the parts of her soul that were angry or jealous, were left in that room. And that’s what Emily’s been hearing. Emily sets that part of her friend’s soul free. But now she knows the truth.
Though Freddie is completely wrong in his gambling, Emily is no saint. She, too, has had issues and kept secrets. Before her accident, she slept with her boss to get a promotion. And she ended up pregnant but didn’t know who the father was. Well, she lost that baby in the fall. But now, she’s pregnant again and she knows it’s Freddie’s. And she thinks this will make things better. Before she had a chance to tell him, he stabbed her seemingly without knowing it. She dies but comes back. And those angry feelings she had are gone. Freddie seems happy. But Emily somehow remembers her own death and ends up poisoning his beer.
So, while the ‘new and improved’ Freddie and Emily are happy, those bads parts of them are trapped upstatirs – together! That actually cracked me up. I mean, if they were both just honest with each other, none of this might have happened. Or would it have anyway? It was the house that brought them there and seemingly kept them angry and doing things to hurt each other.
Overall, this was a great book. I took it with me to Tulsa and read it in the hotel after soccer games. Finished it in just a couple of days. I enjoyed it because I wasn’t sure if this was a real ghost or just something in her head – some hallucination due to her accident. This turned out even better than I could imagine!