She was out of things to busy her hands with and folded her arms awkwardly.
“You keep coming up with new surprises,” he said. “I can’t help wondering what’s going to be next.”
“I’ve never hid anything from you about us. About the present. My past—I left it behind. I didn’t want it to touch us.”
“How can I believe that? What other secrets are you keeping?”
She didn’t answer, looking away instead.
“I’m not the police. I’m not our nosy neighbors. I’m your goddamn husband. You know something about what happened, don’t you? You wouldn’t have to keep all these secrets if you didn’t know something.”
“We promised. All of us,” Emma said.
His gaze sharpened. “Promised? Emma, did your sisters do something?”
“I don’t know.”
“Emma.”
“I don’t know,” she insisted. “The things I saw could have meant a lot of things.”
Her phone chimed. Eager for a reprieve from the conversation, she pulled it out of her pocket. It was a text from Gabriel, with a photo attached. Found this. Thought it might be relevant, it said.
It was a dark photo, taken in the Saracen house. The couch was filthy and stained, but not chewed through; the writing on the walls looked fresh. Logan Ellis, son of Arden’s beloved police chief, had his arm around the shoulders of a girl with big brown eyes and dark hair, spilling loose over her shoulders. She looked nervous, but excited. She wore a plaid skirt and a low-cut blouse under a faux-leather jacket.
Juliette.
There were three other kids in the photo, two crammed on the couch and one sitting on the arm. Emma only recognized one—Elaine Chen, the chain-smoking lead singer of their high school’s resident rock band. Next to her on the couch was a Black guy with a silver stud earring and a goatee who looked like he might have been college age. The other girl, the one perched on the arm of the couch, was white, slim, not exactly pretty but impossible not to notice, with sharp features and intense eyes.
She was wearing a red flannel shirt like a jacket, unbuttoned down the front. Emma had seen a shirt exactly like that before. On Juliette, when she stumbled into the house in the early hours of the morning, the day their parents died. It could have been a coincidence. Except for the other thing.
Juliette’s shoes. She had her knees together, her body pinched inward in discomfort. On her feet were a pair of masculine black boots. Doc Martens, their laces cinched unusually tight.
As if to make up for the fact that they were too large for her feet.
“What is it?” Nathan asked.
She hesitated a moment. And then she turned off the phone and put it back in her pocket. “It’s nothing,” she said.
He didn’t know her sisters. He didn’t love them. She couldn’t explain why it mattered, but it did. She had to start from love. She could believe that Juliette had harmed her parents, but she couldn’t stand the thought of someone else believing it—or believing it without also loving her.
Without understanding what it had been like in this house.
Without understanding that the first thing she had felt when she saw her mother’s empty eyes, the blood speckling her throat, was relief.
20
JULIETTE
Then
Emma is fighting with Mom and Dad again. Juliette can’t hear the details, and doesn’t care to. There’s always something. She hears a name—Gabriel—and remembers her parents’ earlier discussion, but it still makes no sense. Emma doesn’t hang out with boys. Ever. Dad makes comments here and there, jokes that aren’t jokes about how she’d better be careful or people are going to start thinking she’s a lesbian.
Of course, one can’t be too interested in boys, either. Juliette has learned to walk that careful line. Learned it well, after she came home at fifteen with what her mother deemed a whorish amount of makeup and her father asked her if she’d done anything with that boy she ought to be ashamed of. She promised she hadn’t—they hadn’t even held hands—and he held her chin and stared into her eyes, and with his thumb smeared the peach-colored gloss from her lips. “Keep it that way,” he said, and she did.
For a while.
Juliette puts her headphones on, turning up her music. The screaming is upstairs now. There comes a yell and a thump and then fleeing footsteps, and the front door slams. Juliette closes her eyes and hums, her body tense.
If Emma keeps provoking them like this, she thinks, someone is going to wind up dead.