He was silent a moment. “He’s older than you.”
“Five years older,” Emma acknowledged. She rubbed the back of her neck. How could she have been so foolish as to hope that things would be sunshine and roses between her and Gabriel? After everything that had happened?
“So he’s my age, then,” Nathan said. She raised an eyebrow at him. He raised one back. “Just saying. Maybe you have a thing for older guys.”
“Five years is not ‘older guys’ once you hit your midtwenties,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“No, no, I like where this is going. I could be your silver fox,” Nathan said. She knew he was trying to lighten the mood, but that old frustration and fear wouldn’t ease. No matter how many times she said it, they never believed her.
“We weren’t together,” she insisted, voice rising. Nathan’s smile fell. His face clouded over. She stalked past him. Grabbed hold of the gate to pull it all the way open so they could drive through.
First Ellis and then Hadley had tried and tried to make her admit it. Hadley with threats and bluster, Ellis with understanding and sympathy. They’d tried to get her to say she was sleeping with Gabriel. That her parents had found out. That they had plotted the murders to get rid of the obstacle to their relationship.
She didn’t know how they’d gotten the idea that she and Gabriel were involved. She had been, naively, convinced that the truth would be its own defense. Eventually, they would realize they were wrong, and look elsewhere.
She had been horribly mistaken.
And Gabriel had paid the price.
8
JULIETTE
Then
Juliette’s hands shake. They haven’t felt warm since last night. She pulls her white cardigan tighter around her, but it’s no match for the air-conditioning overcompensating for the muggy air outside. On Chief Ellis’s desk, a paper flutters in the breeze the AC kicks up.
The door opens; Rick Hadley comes in. She smiles at him politely, a well-trained reflex. He smiles back, but the expression seems forced. “Thanks for waiting, Juliette.”
“Of course,” she replies, all sugar. “Are my sisters all right?”
“As well as can be expected, I think,” Hadley says. She nods gravely. Her fingers twitch. She folds them in her lap to hide it.
“Officer Hadley—”
“Juliette, I’ve known you since you were a baby. You can just call me Rick,” he says. She doesn’t want to. She hates calling adults by their first names. Her mother always says—said—it’s disrespectful. More than that, it’s disorienting, skewing the lines between adult and child, disrupting the clear and easy rules of what she ought to say and do.
But she needs Hadley to like her. She needs him to keep smiling at her and tell her what to do, because there are no rules for what’s happened, and no Mom to tell her what’s right. Only an infinite number of potential mistakes.
Instead of walking around the back of the desk, Hadley leans against the front. Juliette blinks up at him, trying to look attentive, but she’s sure she looks the way she feels—exhausted. Broken. Her mind snags on the image of a sharp fragment of bone, a single hair stuck to it with a smear of drying blood.
“I know this has been a hard day,” Hadley says. He’s trying to sound gentle, but he’s bad at it. Anger glints in his eyes. Not anger at her, she thinks. At least, not yet. His finger taps the front of the desk. “We’re doing everything we can to figure out what happened to your parents, Juliette. But we need your help. We need you to tell us the truth.”
“Of course,” she says immediately, eyes wide. What does he know?
“I asked Chief Ellis to let me talk to you myself first. So you could talk to a friend.”
A friend. She supposes she has always given Mr. Hadley the impression that she likes him. She’s good at convincing people of that. It’s instinctual. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he thinks she’ll trust him.
She tries to arrange her face into an expression of sufficient gratitude. She’s cried so much in the last few hours that her whole face feels puffy, her skin oddly stretched. She’s sure she looks like a wreck. Her mother would be ashamed.
“Now, you and your sisters all claim that you spent the night in the tree house,” Hadley says.
“That’s right,” she confirms. This is easy. This is what they agreed on. The story is simple, and they will all tell it the same way every time, and everything will be all right.
“Could one of your sisters have left at any point?”