“Help me, will you?” she asked. Together they stripped the bed. She marched to the hall closet, where she found a set of linens, stale-smelling but serviceable, and made up the bed again, fresh. She stared at it. Nodded once. Looked at Nathan. “This is our house now. Until we leave, it’s ours, not theirs. What happened here doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. That’s the only way this works.” The only way she could bear it.
“Okay,” he said immediately, though his eyes were troubled.
She walked back out into the hall. The sacred, forbidden places of her sisters’ rooms, she invaded, flinging open each one in turn. The soft yellow stripes of Juliette’s room and the pale green of Daphne’s. Chosen, of course, by their mother. Daphne’s closet was open and cleared out, and with a jolt Emma realized she must have come back at some point for her things.
She opened Juliette’s closet, but most of her clothes were still there—all pale pastels and whites, delicate filmy dresses and cashmere cardigans. They all had clothes like that, but Juliette was the only one who would have picked them out on her own. She patiently straightened her hair each morning, taming its wild waves, or braided it into an orderly plait. She dressed in skirts and white stockings and used only the soft shimmer of lip gloss their mother approved of, tiny silver studs in her ears that she had waited for her thirteenth birthday to get. She practiced piano dutifully for an hour every day, two hours on Sundays, and never made excuses to get out of going to church.
Juliette had been the perfect daughter. Everything that Emma couldn’t be. It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. For years she’d contorted herself to fit into the mold that her mother wanted, but she’d failed. No matter how hard she worked at it, she was scrappy and sloppy and sharp-tongued and devious and unladylike, and finally she’d broken. If she was going to be the bad daughter no matter what she did, then she’d do whatever she liked.
And all the while, Juliette had yes, Mother-ed and no, Mother-ed her way into the golden light of her parents’ approval. Never strayed a step out of line.
Except …
Emma stared at the orderly line of Mary Janes and ballet flats in the closet, and she thought of that night. Juliette stumbling through the door, her feet bare, her hair soaked, her clothes dry. Not her clothes. Clothes that Emma had never once seen her wear—a black tank top, an oversize red flannel button-up, black jeans that clung to her like a second skin.
“Your sisters,” Nathan said from the doorway. She looked up, her mind scrambling for purchase, reorienting to the here and now.
“My sisters?” she repeated.
“Is this why you’re estranged?” he asked. He hesitated. “Do they think that you…？”
He was an easy man to read, Nathan. It had always comforted her. But now, she wished she could believe his lie. Believe that he believed. But it was there in his eyes, that glistening doubt. The maybe of it all, the what if.
Maybe she did do it.
What could she say? I don’t know if they think that I did it. She thought Daphne must. When Emma had come for her, riding in on her white horse—well, a twenty-year-old sedan that coughed and rattled—meaning to whisk her away from her foster home, Daphne had refused to even come to the door. Emma had sent the wedding invitation in a fit of vain hope—the same reason she sent birthday and Christmas cards every year, only giving up when she started getting Juliette’s back with No Longer at This Address written in her sister’s perfect handwriting.
But Daphne had shown up, she and Christopher Best—“an old family friend,” she’d told Nathan, which was technically true—joining an anemic trickle of friends to fill out Emma’s side of the church. Daphne had spoken to no one, and at the end of the evening had fixed Emma with a look and said, “I’d hoped for more from you.” And then she’d left.
Maybe they thought she’d done it, and that was why they had abandoned her.
Or maybe it was not because of blame, but guilt.
Blood drying on the hallway floor.
Juliette in a stranger’s clothes.
Daphne, her sleeves soaked with blood, sleeping soundly in the tree house.
She hadn’t known what happened. She hadn’t wanted to know. She had taken care of it. She had accepted the suspicion, had even leaned into it at times, to pull the attention away from her sisters.
They had paid her back by abandoning her. And now Nathan was looking at her with that quavering light in his eyes. With all the questions that she had choked on all those years ago. He wouldn’t ever say it. But he would think it, every day. And eventually, he would walk away, just like Juliette. Just like Daphne.