“We can’t,” she said. It felt like she was forcing the words out against something solid. She never thought of it as the house where she’d grown up. Only the house where her parents died.
“This is the perfect solution. We move into your folks’ old house. We fix it up, talk to your sisters about selling it, and then we can buy our own house. It’s ridiculous that you’ve all just left it sitting there empty,” he said.
“I can’t go back there,” Emma said, shaking her head. Not to the house. Not to Arden Hills.
He made a frustrated noise. “Why not? Come on, Emma. You’re not being rational. We need a place to live. You own a house. It’s not complicated.” He gathered her to him, her face pressed against his chest. She closed her eyes and breathed in the familiar scent of him. “If you want to have this baby, we have to do this. We’ll move into the house. We’ll figure things out.”
The button of his shirt dug into her cheek. She let him hold her, and said nothing.
Secrets shifted beneath her skin, ready to bloom.
* * *
Emma had never lied to Nathan about her past.
Not exactly.
She’d told him she had two sisters, one older and one younger, that they hadn’t spoken in years, that they had drifted apart after their parents died when she was sixteen. That they had inherited the house—four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two acres of land.
That Juliette, already eighteen when their parents died, had left for college and never came back. That Emma and Daphne had been shuffled off into foster care—split up and then spit out.
He’d asked how her parents died. Of course he had. Delicately, pressing a kiss against her shoulder, his hand against her hip, because that was the only time she ever talked to him about her past—stripped bare in the dark, looking anywhere but into his eyes.
She hadn’t lied.
She’d let him lie for her.
“Was it an accident?” he’d asked.
“They never found the person,” she had said, and let him think it was the answer to his question. Let him imagine screeching tires and winding roads.
Now, after the sun had set and they’d retreated to bed, she fixed her eyes on the slanted light from the street that stole through the blinds.
“My parents didn’t die in an accident,” she said. She felt him shift behind her, felt the weight of his attention. “They were murdered.”
“Your parents were murdered?” Nathan asked, hurt and accusation and bewilderment braided together plainly in his voice. She could read every strand. She turned, finally, to face him, but the shadows stole the contours of his expression from her.
In the safety of the dark, she told him. How they had died in the house. Been shot. A bullet to the brain, a bullet to the heart. A missing gun.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I didn’t want that to be what you knew about me,” she said. “I didn’t want to think about it.”
He was silent. She could feel something between them, a rebalancing. His mistake weighed against her secret.
“You need to know,” she said. She traced her fingertips down the side of his face and silently prayed as she had so many times—a prayer of a single word. Stay, stay, stay. “If we go back, you’re going to hear some things.”
“What kind of things?”
“You’re going to hear that I did it,” she whispered.
He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, his words were toneless. “Did you?”
“No. It wasn’t me,” Emma said. She wondered if he believed her. She wondered if anyone had ever believed her.
He rolled over, half on top of her, her legs trapped beneath his. “It will be okay,” he told her. “We’ll be okay.”
His tongue slid between her teeth, and she wondered if he tasted the secrets lingering there.
The secrets still hidden within the walls of the house that was drawing them, inescapably, home.
2
EMMA
Now
Arden Hills was like a dead tree in a forest. Even as it rotted, new life had sprung up, feeding off the decay. Real estate agents and New York transplants took the place of beetles and fungi, that was all, and in a few years all that would be left of the version of the town Emma had grown up in would be a heap of rich loam beneath the new growth.
Outside of town, hobby farms cluttered the landscape, their chicken roosts decorated with faux-distressed signs reading LADIES ONLY or THE HEN HOUSE, decorated with shutters and windowsill planters.