Emma’s lip curled. “And I what?”
“You told us what to do. We hid things. We lied,” Juliette said in a whisper, as if there were anyone alive in this house to hear. “Then Gabriel Mahoney gets arrested and everyone’s saying you two killed them. What the fuck was I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know. What was I supposed to think when you came in the door wearing someone else’s clothes, when you were supposed to be asleep in bed?” Emma shot back. “I never told anyone. I didn’t say a goddamn word, but you were happy to sell me out.”
“All I told Hadley was that you were seeing Gabriel.”
“And that I wasn’t in the tree house. But you let him keep thinking you were,” Emma said.
“He knew we were lying. I was doing damage control,” Juliette protested. Emma stared at her. Juliette wasn’t like Nathan. She’d always been hard to read. She would arrange her features into demure smiles and simpering adoration for their parents, shoot poisonous glares at her sisters. And if you caught her when she thought no one was looking, she always had a peculiarly blank expression. Like she was waiting to be informed of what performance was required of her. Now her expression was wounded, defensive. But there might have been anything underneath.
“Juliette,” Emma began.
“JJ,” her sister said, with the tone of a correction. She set the mug on the counter beside her, the coffee untouched. “I go by JJ now.”
“Fine. JJ,” Emma amended, the name sounding false to her ears. “Did you come all this way to rehash the past?”
“No,” JJ said. “I came to find out what you’re planning to do with the house.”
She is lying, Emma thought. But what other reason could she have for coming? “There isn’t a plan,” Emma said. “We needed a place to stay for a while. I figured no one else was using it.”
“I don’t understand how you could live in this place,” JJ said, unconvinced.
“It’s just a house.”
“We should have sold it a long time ago. Or burned it down,” JJ said, looking along the ceiling, as if peering into the soul of the house itself.
Isn’t that what she’d wanted, too? Out of their hands or out of the world completely. But now, with JJ standing in this kitchen, Emma couldn’t help but look at her as an intruder—an intruder in Emma’s home.
“Is that what you want to do? Sell it?” Emma asked.
“It seems like the sensible thing, right? Then we can all pretend this place never existed,” JJ said.
“And we can do the same about each other,” Emma replied icily.
“That’s not what I said.”
“We need all three of us to sign off on selling the house,” Emma said, ignoring her. “If you can get Daphne on board, fine. We’ll talk about it.”
“What does she think about the whole thing?” JJ asked.
“How should I know?”
JJ’s brow furrowed. “You haven’t discussed it?”
Emma looked at her evenly. “I’ve spoken to Daphne once in the last fourteen years.”
“What?” JJ looked dumbfounded.
“You do know that she was in foster care,” Emma said.
“You both were,” JJ said. “You were together. It wasn’t like I could take care of you. I was a college student in the dorms—then getting kicked out of the dorms. I couldn’t…” Her teeth clicked shut.
“After I aged out, I got my own place and tried to get custody, but she didn’t want anything to do with me. Neither of you did,” Emma said. Her voice was steady but her hands clenched, holding tight against the surge of old anger, old grief.
“I didn’t realize.”
“Clearly.” It came out a snarl.
“Emma. When you came to my door that day I was a mess. I’d dropped out of school, I was drinking and taking a seriously dangerous amount of drugs and doing the kind of sleeping around that ends with being dismembered in a dumpster.”
“And now?” Emma asked. She had no idea what her sister did with herself.
“I got my life together eventually,” she said, hesitant.
“What do you do, then? Bartender? Musician?” Emma asked.
“I work at a bank, actually,” JJ said with a wry smile. “What about you? Did you end up going to art school like you planned?”
Emma’s mouth tightened in a flat line. “No. I didn’t go to art school.” JJ’s smile faltered. “You didn’t come here to catch up. Or to talk about selling the house. You could have done that over the phone. So why are you really here, Juliette?” Emma asked.