“Never got around to it,” I said. Though the device still sat there, uselessly pointed at empty space. Those cameras, for our safety, they could just as easily be turned against you. The petty infractions they exposed; the relationships they ruined. I wasn’t sure a camera would ever keep me safe when the person convicted had a key.
After we finished eating, I took our plates to the kitchen and tossed the pizza box in the trash can inside the garage, thinking Ruby would be heading to bed soon. Thinking surely she’d be as tired as I was. The sun and the drinks, and who knew how long it had been since she’d last slept.
“Do you need anything before I go to bed?” I asked, turning off the television, hoping she would take the hint.
She shifted positions on the couch, letting Koda settle onto her lap. “I’m good. I’m just—God, it’s so quiet. I’m not used to so much silence.”
But it was only inside the walls that was quiet. Outside, the sounds of the night came alive, things encroaching from the woods and the lake. The crickets chirping and the tiny frogs bellowing, a sound I once mistook for something larger, until a frog had plastered itself to the front window—letting out a call so sharp and close, I’d thought it was a cry for help.
During the investigation, we had established an official neighborhood watch. A self-imposed curfew. The remnants of our fear carried over long after. We locked our doors and the patio gates, we pulled the curtains tight, we slept with a can of Mace beside our beds—or more. We listened to the silence. We whispered. We reimagined the noises we’d heard drifting from our neighbors’ homes. The music at three a.m. The fight. The bang. We stared at the ceilings, slept odd hours, searched through our old camera footage.
Ruby didn’t know, she had come back to someplace different.
“Good night, Harper,” she said when I hadn’t made a move to leave.
“Good night,” I said. I hated to leave her there, but I did. Didn’t want her to think that I didn’t trust her here, that I was afraid.
My room—the master—faced the front, and hers faced the back, a smaller room with a Jack-and-Jill bathroom connecting to the loft, which looked out over the stairway and entrance. Inside my bedroom, I checked my phone one last time. No one else had reached out. I’d expected more calls, more texts, more questions. But the silence said something, too. The nature of my friendships here, too fragile to withstand Ruby’s return.
The thing we learned last year, or maybe the thing we had always known, was that there were two versions of Hollow’s Edge. There was the one on the surface, where we waved to our neighbor, and passed along recommendations, and held the pool gate, smiling.
And then there was the other, simmering underneath.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d witnessed the same from the inside, growing up. With my brother, Kellen, in and out of rehab since he was sixteen, and the strain of my parents’ relationship, fracturing under the disagreements and the blame. So different from the facade we presented to the outside, glossing over reality with good posture and white lies.
Eventually, I heard Ruby coming up the stairs. I heard her in the shower. I relaxed, rolling over, eyes fixed on the door. And then I saw her shadow just outside my door. I counted to ten, and it didn’t move. I stared at the doorknob, thinking I should’ve locked it. Then wondering which was worse—Ruby coming in or Ruby realizing I was afraid?
Finally, the shadow retreated. But I heard the sound of her steps on the staircase and then the back door creaking open. I bolted upright in bed, imagining all the places she could be going. All the things she could be doing. Staring at the clock on my bedside table to mark the time—being a good witness.
Maybe there was nothing to worry about here. Maybe I was reading too much into things. Maybe she just wanted fresh air, and who could blame her, really?
But all I could think of was that other night. The one we had to keep revisiting, with the cops, with ourselves—when I’d heard that same creak of the back door and the shower running around two a.m.
It hadn’t meant anything to me then. Not even after we’d found them.
No one was afraid at first. Shocked, yes. Upset, of course. But not afraid. Or at least not afraid of anything more than ourselves, what we might’ve missed. Because when Brandon and Fiona were discovered deceased, we didn’t yet know it was a crime—well, nothing further than a domestic crime of murder-suicide （and we could make a case for it going either way）。 A crime that was self-contained.