Did they deserve to die? She didn’t know. She’d hated them in a way that was indistinguishable from love, loved them in a way that might have been hatred. She had feared her father and resented her mother and wanted to leave forever, but there were good memories, too, there must be, she would remember them soon. A good birthday, a day at the park, a kind word. She knew they existed, but they skittered away from her groping mind now. All she could remember of her parents was the sound of a blade tearing through canvas and the darkening shade of red against her mother’s pale skin.
“I hated them,” JJ said. Her fingernails dug into the meat of her arm. “I thought that I could keep pretending to be Perfect Juliette until Daphne got out of school. But eventually they were going to find out what I was up to.”
“I never told anyone. Never,” Emma said. “Not about the blood, Daphne. Or your clothes, JJ. I kept quiet because I’d never been able to protect you. Not from Mom and Dad. But from the police … I could do that. But then you left me. Both of you.” She didn’t mean to sound so pathetic. “Did you think that I did it? Did you think—”
“I was afraid,” Daphne said, and Emma fell silent. “There were letters. Anonymous notes. They would say things like ‘I know’ and ‘You’ll never be safe.’ So I thought I had to keep quiet, or my sisters would die. I thought I could keep you safe by staying away.”
JJ looked startled. “I got the same kind of letters,” she said.
Emma frowned. “I never…” she started, but then she realized she was wrong. “I thought they were from Hadley. He used to call me all the time, I assumed the letters were him, too, trying to get me to talk.”
Daphne’s head tilted. “So you thought it was Hadley trying to get you to confess, and I thought they were someone trying to get us to keep quiet?” she asked. “Seems like whoever it was had a messaging problem.”
Emma barked out a laugh, startling all of them, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. She stood, pacing a bit, needing the movement.
She’d missed them. Her sisters.
They hadn’t always liked one another. They hadn’t always helped one another. But they’d been in this house together, and together, they’d stayed alive. They’d survived, and they’d needed one another to do it.
She didn’t want to know. She just wanted to be with them again. To be home. And for all the rest of it not to matter—their parents and Nathan and all of it.
“Emma,” Daphne said. She folded her hands in her lap, her expression apologetic.
She couldn’t avoid it. She couldn’t have her sisters and her ignorance, and let the rest of the world fade.
She had to know.
“Tell me,” she said, and they did.
44
DAPHNE
Then
Daphne kneels beside her mother and stares at Juliette, standing in the doorway to the study.
Juliette has the gun.
She holds it at her side with a strange ease, so relaxed that it’s almost as if she’s forgotten she’s holding it. There is a streak of blood on the side of her thumb and a speckling of it on her shirt and her face, fine glistening drops that smear when she raises her hand to wipe her cheek. “What are you doing, Daph?” she asks, her voice oddly toneless.
“I—I was—” Daphne says. She looks down and realizes her mother has stopped breathing. The pulse at her neck has gone still. Out of her misery, Daphne thinks.
“Come look,” Juliette says. She gestures with the gun. Its barrel sweeps over Daphne and she cringes.
“Juliette, please don’t—”
“Come on,” Juliette says, impatient. Daphne lurches to her feet, balling her hands into fists and forcing herself to approach. Juliette doesn’t quite have the gun pointed at her, but it isn’t pointed very far away, either. None of it makes sense. Juliette shouldn’t be here. Juliette shouldn’t have the gun.
In the study, their father’s body is slumped in his chair. There is no misery for him. No way he is still alive, or lived for more than a moment after the bullet smashed through his skull. Juliette approaches and Daphne follows.
“Look. You can see his brain,” Juliette says, pointing, her finger so close to the wound that it almost touches.
Daphne slaps it away with a sound of horror.
Juliette stares at her. “Is this real?” she asks. Her face crumples. She looks like she’s going to cry. What’s wrong with her? “No, no, no, no,” she’s saying, and she puts her hands to her head, the gun still gripped in one of them.