No One Can Know(103)

Right now they were in the sunroom, recently refreshed with new furniture that was less likely to jab a spur of wicker into curious palms. Vic and JJ were visiting; Gabriel was coming by later for dinner. The house was more alive than it had been in years.

Gabriel was spending quite a lot of time at the house, in fact. And when he wasn’t at the house, Emma was often with him. They hadn’t gone out on a date quite yet. Eighteen months, Daphne was guessing—that’s how long it would take for Emma to start feeling like she could live life post-Nathan properly. Personally, Daphne would have given the man six months tops, but she recognized that Emma had a certain attachment to him.

It really was for the best that he was gone. Something had to be done.

And people were so rarely willing to do it.

Like her mother. Daphne had known as soon as her father made that call that something terrible was going to happen. She’d gone to her mother, woken her up out of her deep sleep—her stupor, really. She’d told her that he had the drive, that he knew. Something had to be done. But her mother was in denial. She thought she could talk him down. Daphne knew she was wrong. And she knew where her mother kept the gun that Rick Hadley had given her—the gun he’d taken from Logan Ellis.

She’d stood on her tiptoes and lifted the gun high to shoot him. The kickback had hurt her wrists, but she’d been worried that they would be able to tell it was someone short who’d done it. She needn’t have worried so much; CSI turned out not to be terribly representative of small-town police departments.

Part of her had expected her mother to thank her. Instead, Irene Palmer had stared at her with no expression at all, and then told her to hand over the gun and get out. So Daphne had done what she was told. Until she heard the second shot.

She had to protect them. All of them. Something had to be done, and she’d done it.

It was why she’d done everything. For her and for her sisters. To protect them. Nothing else mattered. No one else mattered. It was Emma and Juliette and Daphne—and Wren.

But they were safe now. All of them. There were no more questions to ask, only answers, neat and final. Maybe there would be some trouble if Hadley ever woke up, but the odds of that were vanishingly low.

Really, someone ought to put him out of his misery.

“Misery, misery, misery,” Daphne crooned, bouncing Wren on her knee. The baby laughed, hands wrapped tightly around Daphne’s index fingers.



* * *



Emma watched Daphne cooing at Wren, Wren laughing uproariously. It was hard to know which of them was more delighted.

The whole house was coming together, piece by piece. At first, they fully intended to put in the work and then sell it, but as the weeks turned into months, they had stopped talking about that possibility as much. Vic and JJ spent as much time here as they did at home. The wallpaper was gone; the hardwoods patched; the study converted into a second master bedroom. Gabriel was even helping to put in an en suite, stealing some square footage from the ostentatiously useless great room.

“She’s good with kids,” JJ noted, hands in her back pockets, a smile curling at the corner of her mouth. Emma turned toward her.

“I don’t know what I would do without her to help,” she confessed. And she didn’t.

Daphne was a wonder, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her family. Wren included. Emma knew that.

She knew other things, too.

She knew that her mother was entirely capable of murder.

She also knew that her mother was the kind of woman with an exit plan. She wasn’t like Emma. If she had decided to kill her husband, she would have had a way out afterward.

She knew that Daphne was still keeping secrets.

But no one could ever really know another person, could they? Everyone had secrets.

JJ was in the sunroom now, pulling faces at Wren. Emma looked around the house. She’d tried to run from this place, but it had always been her home. Their home. It belonged to them, and they belonged to one another.

And that was all she needed to know.

Emma smiled, and went to join her sisters.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


No One Can Know is my thirteenth published book, and I think I may be running out of ways to say thank you—which is quite inconvenient when the list of people I am grateful to only keeps growing. This book was a particular challenge to write; untangling the three sisters’ pasts and presents was a difficult and sometimes maddening task, which I absolutely could not have achieved without the help of the No Name Writing Group—Rhiannon Held, Corry L. Lee, Shanna Germain, Rashida Smith, Erin M. Evans, and Susan Morris. Special thanks to Erin and Susan, who are absolutely brilliant and went above and beyond the call of duty to answer my plaintive cries for help.

This book is dedicated to my parents, and I feel like as well as a thank-you I owe them an apology for the sheer number of terrible parents in my books. In my defense, if I just wrote about kind, supportive, loving parents like you, it would get pretty boring.

Thank you also to my wonderful spouse, Mike, who knew what he was getting into when he married me, and to my kids, who remain frustrated that I don’t write proper books with pictures in them.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my agent, Lauren Spieller, and my editor, Christine Kopprasch, for being this book’s earliest and most dedicated advocates. And thank you to everyone at Flatiron who helped bring it to life—the Flatiron team has been an absolute dream to work with from the start, and I couldn’t be happier.