She knew one thing for sure. All these years, she had struggled to tease apart her guilt and her grief, unable to tell one from the other. Only now that her guilt had been lifted away did she realize that there was nothing else there.
She might have grieved once. But there were no more ghosts in this house.
JJ was done being haunted.
54
EMMA
Now
“We need to talk,” Emma said.
“Do we?” Daphne asked, not quite pleading.
They were gathered together in the living room. Daphne sat; Juliette perched on the arm of a chair; Emma crossed her arms and stood near the doorway.
They hadn’t had a moment properly alone since the river.
“We’re not doing this again,” Emma said. “Here, with the three of us, we tell the truth. All of it. We’re not spending another fourteen years hiding from each other.”
“The truth,” Daphne echoed, and Emma saw something flicker behind her eyes. She was deciding how much to reveal—or how much she had to.
“Hadley didn’t kill Mom,” JJ said. Emma’s eyes cut to her. JJ blew out a ragged breath. “She killed herself. I was standing right in front of her.”
“You can’t be certain of your own memories,” Daphne pointed out.
“I know. But I think I’m right,” JJ said. “But I don’t understand why she would do it.”
Emma’s arms were crossed so tightly across her body that her ribs ached. “Dad knew that she’d collected that evidence, right? He had to guess it was her. Which meant she was in danger. She told Hadley she was afraid of him. If she was the one who shot him, and then she wasn’t able to face what she’d done…”
“We said it was Hadley,” JJ said.
“The police said it was Hadley. We just told them what we knew,” Daphne replied.
“But we have to—”
“Tell them what, exactly? That you’ve recovered a new drug-addled memory, and unlike the previous two things you were absolutely sure of, this one is definitely correct?” Daphne asked sharply, and Emma held out a restraining hand.
“JJ, you’re right. We should tell the police. But we can’t,” Emma said steadily. JJ gave her a wild look, uncomprehending.
“Why not?” JJ asked.
“It complicates things,” Daphne said. “And right now, we don’t need anyone asking questions they think they know the answers to. It’s safer this way.”
“He still came after us. He still murdered Nathan,” JJ said.
Emma didn’t answer. She looked at Daphne, and Daphne looked at her.
“Emma,” Daphne said. Her voice was tender, soft. “Rick Hadley is a very bad man.”
“Yes. He is,” Emma said. Her heart was beating fast, but she could hardly feel it. She felt outside of her own body, like she was watching the whole scene from above. “But he didn’t kill our parents. And he didn’t kill Nathan.”
JJ looked at her blankly. “Of course he did. He had the gun. He had the drive.”
“No. He didn’t,” Emma said. “He tried to get us to tell him where it was. Which means he didn’t have it.” JJ’s eyes widened. In all the chaos, she must not have remembered. Must not have put it together the way Emma had.
“Emma,” Daphne said again, almost chiding, almost pleading.
“No more secrets. Not between us,” Emma said. Not this time. “Tell me.”
55
DAPHNE
Now
She didn’t intend for Nathan to die. She wanted to make that clear. It was obvious that he didn’t deserve Emma, of course. He was strangling her by degrees. She wouldn’t survive staying and she wouldn’t ever leave, but no, Daphne hadn’t planned to kill him. She’d gone into the carriage house to find the drive, that was all. The drive and the gun; once she had those, he could tear the place apart for all she cared.
She hadn’t intended for him to find her on her knees, pawing around in the now-empty toolbox that should have contained the flash drive. She certainly hadn’t intended for him to grab the gun from the table and point it right at her. She’d even tried to talk to him, but she didn’t like the way his finger was on that trigger, clamped right over it, and all of him shaking with adrenaline, and she’d started thinking about that phone call she’d just overheard, all the things he’d been saying about her sister to that woman he was sleeping with, about how he was going to try to get full custody from his crazy, probably murderous wife with her criminal family, about how he was going to take her money and run. And Daphne started thinking, was that the man she wanted raising her little niece or nephew? Was that a man who ought to be in a child’s life at all?