“All I told Hadley was that you were seeing Gabriel.”
“And that I wasn’t in the tree house. But you let him keep thinking you were,” Emma said.
“He knew we were lying. I was doing damage control,” Juliette protested. Emma stared at her. Juliette wasn’t like Nathan. She’d always been hard to read. She would arrange her features into demure smiles and simpering adoration for their parents, shoot poisonous glares at her sisters. And if you caught her when she thought no one was looking, she always had a peculiarly blank expression. Like she was waiting to be informed of what performance was required of her. Now her expression was wounded, defensive. But there might have been anything underneath.
“Juliette,” Emma began.
“JJ,” her sister said, with the tone of a correction. She set the mug on the counter beside her, the coffee untouched. “I go by JJ now.”
“Fine. JJ,” Emma amended, the name sounding false to her ears. “Did you come all this way to rehash the past?”
“No,” JJ said. “I came to find out what you’re planning to do with the house.”
She is lying, Emma thought. But what other reason could she have for coming? “There isn’t a plan,” Emma said. “We needed a place to stay for a while. I figured no one else was using it.”
“I don’t understand how you could live in this place,” JJ said, unconvinced.
“It’s just a house.”
“We should have sold it a long time ago. Or burned it down,” JJ said, looking along the ceiling, as if peering into the soul of the house itself.
Isn’t that what she’d wanted, too? Out of their hands or out of the world completely. But now, with JJ standing in this kitchen, Emma couldn’t help but look at her as an intruder—an intruder in Emma’s home.
“Is that what you want to do? Sell it?” Emma asked.
“It seems like the sensible thing, right? Then we can all pretend this place never existed,” JJ said.
“And we can do the same about each other,” Emma replied icily.
“That’s not what I said.”
“We need all three of us to sign off on selling the house,” Emma said, ignoring her. “If you can get Daphne on board, fine. We’ll talk about it.”
“What does she think about the whole thing?” JJ asked.
“How should I know?”
JJ’s brow furrowed. “You haven’t discussed it?”
Emma looked at her evenly. “I’ve spoken to Daphne once in the last fourteen years.”
“What?” JJ looked dumbfounded.
“You do know that she was in foster care,” Emma said.
“You both were,” JJ said. “You were together. It wasn’t like I could take care of you. I was a college student in the dorms—then getting kicked out of the dorms. I couldn’t…” Her teeth clicked shut.
“After I aged out, I got my own place and tried to get custody, but she didn’t want anything to do with me. Neither of you did,” Emma said. Her voice was steady but her hands clenched, holding tight against the surge of old anger, old grief.
“I didn’t realize.”
“Clearly.” It came out a snarl.
“Emma. When you came to my door that day I was a mess. I’d dropped out of school, I was drinking and taking a seriously dangerous amount of drugs and doing the kind of sleeping around that ends with being dismembered in a dumpster.”
“And now?” Emma asked. She had no idea what her sister did with herself.
“I got my life together eventually,” she said, hesitant.
“What do you do, then? Bartender? Musician?” Emma asked.
“I work at a bank, actually,” JJ said with a wry smile. “What about you? Did you end up going to art school like you planned?”
Emma’s mouth tightened in a flat line. “No. I didn’t go to art school.” JJ’s smile faltered. “You didn’t come here to catch up. Or to talk about selling the house. You could have done that over the phone. So why are you really here, Juliette?” Emma asked.
This time JJ didn’t correct her. “You being back here is going to make people start thinking about what happened. They’re going to start asking questions again,” she said. And there it was.
“And? Let them talk,” Emma said dismissively, though she tasted something sour in the back of her mouth.
“If the police ask you what happened, what are you going to tell them?” JJ asked, gaze fixed intently on Emma.
Behind the carefully constructed mask, behind the performance of sisterly concern, Emma saw it. A flicker of fear. “What are you worried I might say?” Emma asked.
The front door opened. JJ jumped, nearly knocking the coffee mug over as she straightened. Nathan’s familiar long stride approached, accompanied by his voice.
“Whose car is that in the drive?” he asked, and then stepped into view. JJ tucked her hands into her pockets, shoulders slightly hunched as he caught sight of her. “Oh. Hi.”
“Nathan, this is my sister Juliette,” Emma said neutrally.
Nathan processed this for a moment, eyebrows rising in surprise, then stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Juliette. I’m Nathan. Nathan Gates. I’ve heard all about you, of course.”
JJ took his hand and shook it slowly. “Really. How wonderful. And it’s JJ, actually. I haven’t gone by Juliette since I was a kid.”
“Right,” Nathan said with a sharp nod and a look at Emma like she should have told him. “What brings you by?”
“I just came to talk to Emma about getting the place fixed up to sell,” JJ said, her expression open and friendly.
“Excellent. That’s just what we’ve been talking about,” Nathan said. They hadn’t talked much at all, but he said it as if it were a done deal. “It definitely needs some work. But I was thinking, if you three are all on board with it, we could get a Realtor out. Come up with a plan. Right now, I’m focusing on getting things cleaned out and sorted, so we can decide what to do with it all.”
“Sounds great. You just let me know if you need help,” JJ said easily.
“Are you staying in town? Need your old room for a few days?” Nathan asked. Emma cut him a look, but his eyes hadn’t left JJ, and for the first time Emma realized just how attractive her older sister was, next to mousy Emma in her T-shirt and ponytail.
“You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to spend a night in this fucking place,” JJ said blithely. She looked past Nathan at Emma. “We’ll talk again soon.”
“That will be novel,” Emma said. JJ flinched, and Emma felt a faint flash of satisfaction.
JJ walked out without another word. Emma went to the counter and dumped out the coffee, watching it swirl down the drain. She didn’t know what she’d expected to feel if she ever saw her sisters again. Had she really hoped for an apology? She wasn’t sure there was an apology Juliette could offer that would mean anything.
What was Juliette doing here? Not checking out the house. Checking out Emma, maybe. Something about Emma coming back to the house had worried her. Spooked her, even.
Like maybe she was afraid that Emma was going to spill their secrets, and that Juliette was the one who would pay the price.
“Ah, shit,” Nathan said suddenly. Emma gave him an empty look, uncomprehending. He snapped his fingers. “We should have asked her about the carriage house keys. Think you could give her a call?”
“No,” Emma snapped.
“Whoa. What did I do?” Nathan asked, hands immediately up in surrender. The cold remove that had carried Emma through the conversation with JJ shattered.
“I’m sorry. It’s just—seeing her again…” Emma covered her face with her hands, fighting the edge of a sob.
“Hey.” Nathan stepped over to her, gathered her against his chest. “I’m sorry. You know how bad I am at subtext.”
“That’s an understatement.” Her words were edged with the tears that always seemed to be on the surface these days. She wasn’t sure how much of it she could blame on the hormones. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to feel about her. She left us, Nathan.”