No One Can Know(85)

She drank another shot, and then a third, and then slapped a bill down on the counter and strode out before Logan could come back in.

She’d hoped Logan could fill in the gaps. Could, maybe, absolve her. But the pieces she couldn’t remember didn’t matter, in the end. She knew what had happened.

And the time was coming soon when she couldn’t keep hiding from it.





43

EMMA




Now



Three days after her husband’s death, Emma walked through the door of her house once again.

Gabriel drove her. She had her phone back, too. Apparently it hadn’t taken that long to scrape every crumb of her life off the device to sort through. Her car had been taken in, searched for evidence, and she had instructions on how to retrieve it. There was still crime scene tape fluttering here and there, and heavy shoes had tramped their way through the flower beds.

“You’re sure you want to be here?” Gabriel asked her.

“I always end up back here,” she answered. He looked puzzled, but she didn’t explain as she walked in, leaving him to close the door. Thick drifts of dust floated through the light, and she lifted a hand, stirring eddies through them.

“You can go,” she told Gabriel. He stood in the foyer, hands in his pockets, clearly reluctant to obey. She gave him a steady look. “I’m okay here. Really. You’ve been a huge help, but right now I just want to be alone.”

“You’re sure?”

“Please stop asking me that,” she said.

“Call me if you need anything,” he told her.

Gabriel closed the door behind him. Emma walked to the great room and stood there with her arms crossed, letting the scents and sensations of the house settle against her skin.

Hadley wanted her to believe that her mistake back then had been covering for her sisters when they didn’t deserve it. He was wrong. Her mistake had been covering for them without understanding what had happened.

She took out her phone and made a call. JJ picked up on the second ring.

“Emma,” she said, in a tone that suggested she had been dreading this call.

“I’m back at the house,” Emma said. “We need to talk. All three of us.”

“I know. We’ll come over,” JJ said.

“We?”

“I’m with Daphne. She called me. We had some things to talk about. I think you need to hear them, too. I think it’s time.”

Emma shut her eyes. She’d expected a fight. Without one, she wasn’t sure exactly what to do. “I’ll be here,” she said. The line went dead.



* * *



Emma waited on the porch for her sisters to arrive. They pulled up in separate cars. JJ got out and tucked her hands in her back pockets, coming up to the house with her eyes scuttling left and right nervously. Daphne approached at a steady gait, seemingly unbothered by the strange circumstances of their reunion.

This Daphne was far closer to the version she’d met at the wedding than the one on the cameras. She wore a sharp blazer over a crisp white top and rust-colored skirt, lace-up boots clinging to her calves. Her sunglasses flattered her face, and so did the pixie cut—no more blunt bob or brown hair, no more shapeless tunic. The transformation made the hair on the backs of Emma’s arms stand on end.

The three of them stood spaced a few feet apart, no one quite moving to greet the others. Only Daphne managed a smile. “Here we all are. I wasn’t sure this would ever happen,” she said, upbeat.

“Why don’t you both come in,” Emma suggested, to spare either her or JJ the need to formulate a response. She walked in, and the others trooped after her. She brought them into the living room. “If you want coffee or water or anything, you’re going to have to get it yourself.” She sat down, arms crossed, on one end of the couch.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Daphne said, with a determined kind of pleasantness. She set her purse down next to her on the floor as she took a seat in one of the armchairs. JJ walked to the other but perched on the arm instead of sitting in it, shoulders stooped inward defensively.

“So,” JJ said.

“So,” Emma echoed. She had tried to plan this moment, but every time she imagined it, the pieces fell apart in her mind. Her imagined conversations were braided fragments of words and anger and blame and confusion that didn’t add up to anything. “Where have you been?” she asked.

“You’re the one who took off,” JJ pointed out.

“I didn’t trust you,” Emma said.

JJ’s chin dipped sharply. “Yeah. I got that.”

“Let’s not start out being angry at each other,” Daphne said. She fidgeted with her sleeve.

“How long have you been in town?” Emma asked, looking to Daphne. “I know it’s been at least a week.”

“About that long,” Daphne acknowledged.

“You were spying on me.”

“Checking on you,” Daphne corrected. “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me. Or if I was ready to see you.”

Emma grunted. JJ’s rejection she’d always understood, in a way. Daphne’s was the one that broke her. She’d thought that the two of them understood each other. They didn’t like to get noticed, didn’t know how to play along. She’d been able to bear it, knowing that Daphne and Juliette had been estranged from each other, too. That all three of them had cut themselves adrift—or been cut. She’d been able to convince herself this was just the way that things were always going to be.