But she needs Hadley to like her. She needs him to keep smiling at her and tell her what to do, because there are no rules for what’s happened, and no Mom to tell her what’s right. Only an infinite number of potential mistakes.
Instead of walking around the back of the desk, Hadley leans against the front. Juliette blinks up at him, trying to look attentive, but she’s sure she looks the way she feels—exhausted. Broken. Her mind snags on the image of a sharp fragment of bone, a single hair stuck to it with a smear of drying blood.
“I know this has been a hard day,” Hadley says. He’s trying to sound gentle, but he’s bad at it. Anger glints in his eyes. Not anger at her, she thinks. At least, not yet. His finger taps the front of the desk. “We’re doing everything we can to figure out what happened to your parents, Juliette. But we need your help. We need you to tell us the truth.”
“Of course,” she says immediately, eyes wide. What does he know?
“I asked Chief Ellis to let me talk to you myself first. So you could talk to a friend.”
A friend. She supposes she has always given Mr. Hadley the impression that she likes him. She’s good at convincing people of that. It’s instinctual. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he thinks she’ll trust him.
She tries to arrange her face into an expression of sufficient gratitude. She’s cried so much in the last few hours that her whole face feels puffy, her skin oddly stretched. She’s sure she looks like a wreck. Her mother would be ashamed.
“Now, you and your sisters all claim that you spent the night in the tree house,” Hadley says.
“That’s right,” she confirms. This is easy. This is what they agreed on. The story is simple, and they will all tell it the same way every time, and everything will be all right.
“Could one of your sisters have left at any point?”
“No,” she says immediately, but he gives her a skeptical look.
“Are you sure? One of them couldn’t have climbed down while you were asleep, without you noticing?”
“I … I don’t think so,” she says.
“Who was sleeping nearest the door?”
“Emma. She always sleeps by the door,” Juliette says immediately, and something about the look of satisfaction in his eye makes her afraid.
“Could Emma have left after you fell asleep?”
“No. I would have noticed,” Juliette insists. “Probably,” she adds softly, and hates herself for it. He glances over at the desk, flipping up the top page of a legal pad to look at something written beneath, as if he’s reminding himself of something.
“Right,” he says. “Okay, Juliette, let’s change subjects for a moment. What can you tell me about Emma’s boyfriend?”
She stares at him blankly. “Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend,” she says. Emma with a boyfriend? The thought is almost funny. Emma with her black clothes and sulky attitude and the way she snaps at everyone constantly. Emma who taunted Juliette the first time she went out on a date, and rolls her eyes at every hint of romance, real or fictional? No, Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend.
“So you weren’t aware that she was seeing anyone.”
She thinks of a name, of a knowing look exchanged between her parents. She wonders if this is the reason for the fight last night—the reason Emma took off.
“I didn’t know Emma has a boyfriend,” Juliette says. And then she does something that she will regret for the rest of her life. She bites her lip, looks up at Hadley, and says guilelessly, “I do know Emma was fighting with Mom and Dad. And I think it was about a boy. I think his name is Gabriel Mahoney.”
9
JJ
Now
Nathan and I are going to be staying at the house for a while. Wanted to let you know.
Emma’s number wasn’t even in JJ’s phone, and when the unknown sender’s text had arrived, it had taken her a solid thirty seconds of reading and rereading to figure out it hadn’t been sent to her by mistake. And another minute to remember who the fuck Nathan was. It was over an hour before she mustered the coherence to text back.
What did she care if Emma and her boyfriend (husband? They’d gotten married, hadn’t they?) moved into the house? It wasn’t like she ever wanted to. She’d be happy if it burned to the ground.
She sat on the balcony, on the deck chair wedged into the narrow space next to Vic’s alarming number of plants.
She reached into her pocket, pulled out the silver lighter. There was a bumblebee etched in the metal, landing on a flower. She flipped it open, closed it. Flipped it open again. Lit the flame. Flicked it shut, the sound satisfying.
Emma knew something. She’d found something out.
There’s nothing to find.
We covered our tracks.
She had taken comfort in those words for years, but now they seemed tissue-paper thin, no protection against possibility.
She had never been sure what Emma knew—or guessed, or suspected—about that night.
She might not know anything. She might know everything. It was all the territory in between that frightened JJ the most.
“Here’s what we’re going to do.”
JJ was the oldest. She was supposed to be the one looking after her sisters. And instead, it had been Emma who leaped into action, told them what to do. And then, when Hadley had settled on Emma’s guilt, she’d still never said a word about what she’d seen. Emma had let all that blame and suspicion fall on herself. Carried all the sin and shame of her family.
“You can’t change the past. You can’t take back what happened, to you or to Emma. The best you can do is protect yourself now,” Vic had told her more than once. Easy enough when protecting herself had meant staying quiet, staying out of the way. But that was over.
“That’s it, then,” she said to no one. Flicked the lighter open. Flicked it shut.
She remembered closing her fingers around that cold metal, hands in her pockets, water dripping down her back.
She hadn’t run from her past all these years so much as she’d ignored it. It was finally done ignoring her. And now it was time to choose—stay here, and risk Emma destroying the life JJ had built for herself. Or find a way to protect it.
Except it wasn’t really a choice at all. She couldn’t just hide and hope that the world spared her.
If she wanted her secrets safe, she was going to have to do something about it.
10
EMMA
Now
Emma knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Long after Nathan went up to bed, she remained downstairs, stalking from room to room. She furiously dusted a bookshelf, threw open a closet to shove old coat hangers and ancient wrapping paper into a trash bag, abandoned it to scrub the grime from the powder room faucet. She lurched from room to room and task to task, completing nothing.
And every time she walked through the foyer and the dining room, the words on the wall taunted her.
MURDERER
KILLER
PSYCHO
She’d heard them all. Whispered behind her, spoken boldly to her face. She’d left Arden Hills, but the rumors had followed her to her new high school. The principal and teachers had made noise about making sure the school was a safe place for her, but in their eyes, she’d seen the same questions.
She’d dropped out. Christopher Best had tried to talk her out of it, and her next foster family had reenrolled her in school, but with less than a year until she aged out, it wasn’t like anyone was really paying attention when she just didn’t go. It wasn’t until she was on her own that she got her GED, got herself into community college—far away from Arden Hills.
MURDERER. KILLER. PSYCHO.
She found the bags from the hardware store. She pulled on a mask and rubber gloves, and she got to work. The fumes made her eyes water as she scrubbed at the words, watching them surrender to the chemical assault. She started to feel woozy, realized she hadn’t thought to open a window. She yanked it open. The air was as swampy outside as it was inside.
She had outrun this. For a little while. All it had taken was lying to everyone she met. Lying to her husband.