“Logan—”
“We’re done here,” he said. “I’m going to finish this and go back inside. I’d rather you weren’t there when I do.”
“Got it,” she said in a rasp of sound. She let the cigarette fall from numb fingers and ground it out with her heel.
JJ stalked back inside and up to the bar. The other employee eyed her with something that didn’t quite qualify as curiosity as she approached.
“Whiskey. Don’t care which,” JJ told her. The shot arrived; JJ downed it. Let it chase the taste of tobacco smoke. She pulled out her phone and stabbed in Nina’s name. Social media images popped up. Nina on a beach in a wedding dress, leaning in to kiss her dapperly dressed bride. Nina and her wife with curly-haired, brown-eyed babies on their shoulders. Nina with a good life that didn’t need JJ disrupting it.
She drank another shot, and then a third, and then slapped a bill down on the counter and strode out before Logan could come back in.
She’d hoped Logan could fill in the gaps. Could, maybe, absolve her. But the pieces she couldn’t remember didn’t matter, in the end. She knew what had happened.
And the time was coming soon when she couldn’t keep hiding from it.
43
EMMA
Now
Three days after her husband’s death, Emma walked through the door of her house once again.
Gabriel drove her. She had her phone back, too. Apparently it hadn’t taken that long to scrape every crumb of her life off the device to sort through. Her car had been taken in, searched for evidence, and she had instructions on how to retrieve it. There was still crime scene tape fluttering here and there, and heavy shoes had tramped their way through the flower beds.
“You’re sure you want to be here?” Gabriel asked her.
“I always end up back here,” she answered. He looked puzzled, but she didn’t explain as she walked in, leaving him to close the door. Thick drifts of dust floated through the light, and she lifted a hand, stirring eddies through them.
“You can go,” she told Gabriel. He stood in the foyer, hands in his pockets, clearly reluctant to obey. She gave him a steady look. “I’m okay here. Really. You’ve been a huge help, but right now I just want to be alone.”
“You’re sure?”
“Please stop asking me that,” she said.
“Call me if you need anything,” he told her.
Gabriel closed the door behind him. Emma walked to the great room and stood there with her arms crossed, letting the scents and sensations of the house settle against her skin.
Hadley wanted her to believe that her mistake back then had been covering for her sisters when they didn’t deserve it. He was wrong. Her mistake had been covering for them without understanding what had happened.
She took out her phone and made a call. JJ picked up on the second ring.
“Emma,” she said, in a tone that suggested she had been dreading this call.
“I’m back at the house,” Emma said. “We need to talk. All three of us.”
“I know. We’ll come over,” JJ said.
“We?”
“I’m with Daphne. She called me. We had some things to talk about. I think you need to hear them, too. I think it’s time.”
Emma shut her eyes. She’d expected a fight. Without one, she wasn’t sure exactly what to do. “I’ll be here,” she said. The line went dead.
* * *
Emma waited on the porch for her sisters to arrive. They pulled up in separate cars. JJ got out and tucked her hands in her back pockets, coming up to the house with her eyes scuttling left and right nervously. Daphne approached at a steady gait, seemingly unbothered by the strange circumstances of their reunion.
This Daphne was far closer to the version she’d met at the wedding than the one on the cameras. She wore a sharp blazer over a crisp white top and rust-colored skirt, lace-up boots clinging to her calves. Her sunglasses flattered her face, and so did the pixie cut—no more blunt bob or brown hair, no more shapeless tunic. The transformation made the hair on the backs of Emma’s arms stand on end.
The three of them stood spaced a few feet apart, no one quite moving to greet the others. Only Daphne managed a smile. “Here we all are. I wasn’t sure this would ever happen,” she said, upbeat.
“Why don’t you both come in,” Emma suggested, to spare either her or JJ the need to formulate a response. She walked in, and the others trooped after her. She brought them into the living room. “If you want coffee or water or anything, you’re going to have to get it yourself.” She sat down, arms crossed, on one end of the couch.