“No,” she says immediately, but he gives her a skeptical look.
“Are you sure? One of them couldn’t have climbed down while you were asleep, without you noticing?”
“I … I don’t think so,” she says.
“Who was sleeping nearest the door?”
“Emma. She always sleeps by the door,” Juliette says immediately, and something about the look of satisfaction in his eye makes her afraid.
“Could Emma have left after you fell asleep?”
“No. I would have noticed,” Juliette insists. “Probably,” she adds softly, and hates herself for it. He glances over at the desk, flipping up the top page of a legal pad to look at something written beneath, as if he’s reminding himself of something.
“Right,” he says. “Okay, Juliette, let’s change subjects for a moment. What can you tell me about Emma’s boyfriend?”
She stares at him blankly. “Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend,” she says. Emma with a boyfriend? The thought is almost funny. Emma with her black clothes and sulky attitude and the way she snaps at everyone constantly. Emma who taunted Juliette the first time she went out on a date, and rolls her eyes at every hint of romance, real or fictional? No, Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend.
“So you weren’t aware that she was seeing anyone.”
She thinks of a name, of a knowing look exchanged between her parents. She wonders if this is the reason for the fight last night—the reason Emma took off.
“I didn’t know Emma has a boyfriend,” Juliette says. And then she does something that she will regret for the rest of her life. She bites her lip, looks up at Hadley, and says guilelessly, “I do know Emma was fighting with Mom and Dad. And I think it was about a boy. I think his name is Gabriel Mahoney.”
9
JJ
Now
Nathan and I are going to be staying at the house for a while. Wanted to let you know.
Emma’s number wasn’t even in JJ’s phone, and when the unknown sender’s text had arrived, it had taken her a solid thirty seconds of reading and rereading to figure out it hadn’t been sent to her by mistake. And another minute to remember who the fuck Nathan was. It was over an hour before she mustered the coherence to text back.
What did she care if Emma and her boyfriend （husband? They’d gotten married, hadn’t they?） moved into the house? It wasn’t like she ever wanted to. She’d be happy if it burned to the ground.
She sat on the balcony, on the deck chair wedged into the narrow space next to Vic’s alarming number of plants.
She reached into her pocket, pulled out the silver lighter. There was a bumblebee etched in the metal, landing on a flower. She flipped it open, closed it. Flipped it open again. Lit the flame. Flicked it shut, the sound satisfying.
Emma knew something. She’d found something out.
There’s nothing to find.
We covered our tracks.
She had taken comfort in those words for years, but now they seemed tissue-paper thin, no protection against possibility.
She had never been sure what Emma knew—or guessed, or suspected—about that night.
She might not know anything. She might know everything. It was all the territory in between that frightened JJ the most.
“Here’s what we’re going to do.”
JJ was the oldest. She was supposed to be the one looking after her sisters. And instead, it had been Emma who leaped into action, told them what to do. And then, when Hadley had settled on Emma’s guilt, she’d still never said a word about what she’d seen. Emma had let all that blame and suspicion fall on herself. Carried all the sin and shame of her family.
“You can’t change the past. You can’t take back what happened, to you or to Emma. The best you can do is protect yourself now,” Vic had told her more than once. Easy enough when protecting herself had meant staying quiet, staying out of the way. But that was over.
“That’s it, then,” she said to no one. Flicked the lighter open. Flicked it shut.
She remembered closing her fingers around that cold metal, hands in her pockets, water dripping down her back.
She hadn’t run from her past all these years so much as she’d ignored it. It was finally done ignoring her. And now it was time to choose—stay here, and risk Emma destroying the life JJ had built for herself. Or find a way to protect it.
Except it wasn’t really a choice at all. She couldn’t just hide and hope that the world spared her.
If she wanted her secrets safe, she was going to have to do something about it.