She thinks again of the bus. Of a road leading out of Arden Hills, headlights cutting through the darkness. She can picture herself on it; she can picture it vanishing in the night, in the distant gloom. But there is nothing at the end of that road. She can imagine leaving, but she can’t imagine arriving anywhere. She realizes with a slow seeping defeat that she never did want to go anywhere. She only wanted to be gone. In her fantasy, she disappeared into that night, and there was no other ending but that.
Gabriel is wrong. She cannot survive another few months. She doesn’t see how she possibly could. But the only place she can go is home.
“I’m going to get some water,” she says. Gabriel starts to offer to get it for her, but she waves him off and walks into the kitchen. She gets down a glass and fills it but doesn’t drink. Instead she reaches up above the fridge, carefully taking down the old cookie tin in which Lorelei keeps her “emergency fund.” In the last six months Emma has seen her get it down many times, and when she eases open the lid there are only a few bills loose inside. Emma takes the thick roll from her pocket and nestles it in quietly, replacing the tin back where it was.
Gabriel is still on the bed when she comes back out. “I’m going home,” she says. She sees in his eyes that he wishes he could save her. She knows the cost of trying would be too great, but she still wishes he would.
“I can give you a ride,” he says. She nods, because she knows it will let him feel like he did something, at least. “You don’t have to leave yet. Stay a little while, at least. Rest.”
“Okay,” she whispers. She stays, and curls on top of the covers, and without meaning to drops into a dreamless sleep, deeper than any sleep she’s had in a very long time.
41
EMMA
Now
Emma slunk back in the door feeling like a teenager sneaking in after curfew. The window air conditioner was doing its best to keep up with the heat, but the inside of the house was still sweltering. Gabriel was in the living room, and when she entered he stood abruptly, concern creasing his features. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Is everything okay?”
She couldn’t help the diseased laugh that emerged from her lips. “Not remotely, but I don’t think they’ve gotten much worse,” she told him. “I talked to Hadley.”
“Is that a good idea?” Gabriel asked.
“Probably not,” she admitted. She scraped her hair back from her forehead. “Nathan called Ellis the night he died, right before he called Addison. He said he found something that had to do with my parents’ death.”
“The flash drive,” Gabriel supplied.
“The only thing I can think, the only thing that makes sense, is that it had evidence on it,” Emma said. “My mom had it, and I know she told Chris she had something on my dad. Which your dad knew about, too.”
Gabriel’s hands were in his pockets, his stance seemingly relaxed, but his eyes were hard. “Emma. We know my dad came back right around when your parents died. He hated your dad. Had some choice words for your mom, too,” Gabriel said. “He had a temper. A violent one, sometimes, when he was drunk. Which he usually was. If he killed your parents…”
“We don’t know that,” Emma said. “We don’t know anything for sure.”
“We should talk to Lorelei.”
Emma hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“He might have told her something, when he came back. She might not have realized it was important. Just don’t tell her that he might have…” He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
She thought suddenly and vividly of the portrait she had painted of him all those years ago. The question on his lips; the weight of responsibility already in his gaze; the raw youth of him. She wished she could paint him again the way he was now. Those two paintings, side by side—
But of course, there was no painting of Gabriel at twenty-one any longer. And she hadn’t put a brush to canvas in over a decade.
He gestured toward the back of the house, beckoning her to follow him.
The garden out front was orderly and formal, but out back Lorelei had always let things run a bit wild. Ivy snaked along the fence, sweet peas clambered up trellises, daylilies jostled with peonies for space. Lorelei sat on a cushioned bench out back with a sun hat on, squinting at a text on her phone.
“Your cousin is attempting to communicate with me through a strange runic language,” she said as Gabriel stepped out.
“Those are emojis, Nana,” Gabriel said.