No One Can Know(27)

Juliette raked her thick hair back from her face. It flopped forward again as soon as she released it. Her gaze was wary and almost arrogant. “Can I come in?”

“It’s your house, too,” Emma said flatly. She turned and walked back inside. There was a moment of silence, and then Juliette followed her, shoes squeaking on the hardwood. Their mother would have killed them for wearing shoes in the house, but Emma didn’t say anything as Juliette followed her back down the hall and through the great room, pausing momentarily to look at the piano before traipsing back into the kitchen.

“Coffee?” Emma asked.

“Sure,” Juliette said, hands in her back pockets.

Emma waved at the coffeepot. “Help yourself.”

Juliette’s mouth pursed, but she walked past Emma, getting a dust-rimed mug down from the cupboard where they’d always been. She poured herself the dregs of the morning coffee.

Juliette held the mug in both hands without drinking. Emma stood across the table from her, arms crossed. “So,” Juliette said. She raised an eyebrow. “This is awkward.”

“Really?” Emma said, scoffing. “It’s been a decade and a half, and you haven’t spoken a single word to me. Yeah, that’s awkward.”

“Do you want me to say I’m sorry?” Juliette asked, eyebrow still cocked.

Emma choked on a laugh. “Which sorry would that be, exactly? ‘Sorry I haven’t called you anytime in the last fourteen years, nothing personal’? ‘Sorry I never said a word to help when you were the top suspect in our parents’ murders’? ‘Sorry I left you in foster care, skipped your wedding, never so much as wrote you a birthday card’?”

Juliette had the decency to look away. “I was just a kid.”

“So was I. So was Daphne. We needed you,” Emma said, her voice raw. Pain she’d thought she’d left behind her long ago raked nails down her spine.

“I know. But I was a complete mess,” Juliette said. “I wouldn’t have been any good to you. I couldn’t look after myself, much less you.”

“That didn’t mean you had to disappear,” Emma said.

“Jesus, Emma. What was I supposed to do? Mom and Dad were dead, and you—” Juliette faltered.

Emma’s lip curled. “And I what?”

“You told us what to do. We hid things. We lied,” Juliette said in a whisper, as if there were anyone alive in this house to hear. “Then Gabriel Mahoney gets arrested and everyone’s saying you two killed them. What the fuck was I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know. What was I supposed to think when you came in the door wearing someone else’s clothes, when you were supposed to be asleep in bed?” Emma shot back. “I never told anyone. I didn’t say a goddamn word, but you were happy to sell me out.”

“All I told Hadley was that you were seeing Gabriel.”

“And that I wasn’t in the tree house. But you let him keep thinking you were,” Emma said.

“He knew we were lying. I was doing damage control,” Juliette protested. Emma stared at her. Juliette wasn’t like Nathan. She’d always been hard to read. She would arrange her features into demure smiles and simpering adoration for their parents, shoot poisonous glares at her sisters. And if you caught her when she thought no one was looking, she always had a peculiarly blank expression. Like she was waiting to be informed of what performance was required of her. Now her expression was wounded, defensive. But there might have been anything underneath.

“Juliette,” Emma began.

“JJ,” her sister said, with the tone of a correction. She set the mug on the counter beside her, the coffee untouched. “I go by JJ now.”

“Fine. JJ,” Emma amended, the name sounding false to her ears. “Did you come all this way to rehash the past?”

“No,” JJ said. “I came to find out what you’re planning to do with the house.”

She is lying, Emma thought. But what other reason could she have for coming? “There isn’t a plan,” Emma said. “We needed a place to stay for a while. I figured no one else was using it.”

“I don’t understand how you could live in this place,” JJ said, unconvinced.

“It’s just a house.”

“We should have sold it a long time ago. Or burned it down,” JJ said, looking along the ceiling, as if peering into the soul of the house itself.

Isn’t that what she’d wanted, too? Out of their hands or out of the world completely. But now, with JJ standing in this kitchen, Emma couldn’t help but look at her as an intruder—an intruder in Emma’s home.

“Is that what you want to do? Sell it?” Emma asked.

“It seems like the sensible thing, right? Then we can all pretend this place never existed,” JJ said.

“And we can do the same about each other,” Emma replied icily.

“That’s not what I said.”

“We need all three of us to sign off on selling the house,” Emma said, ignoring her. “If you can get Daphne on board, fine. We’ll talk about it.”

“What does she think about the whole thing?” JJ asked.

“How should I know?”

JJ’s brow furrowed. “You haven’t discussed it?”