“Is there any point bringing that up now, though?” Nathan asked. He sounded almost annoyed. “We’re going to have to work with your sisters to deal with the house. You keeping grudges isn’t going to help with that.”
She pulled away from him, wiping her eyes. “You’re probably right.”
“I get that you’re emotional,” he said. “But you have to let go of the past to move into the future, right?”
“Did you see that in a TED Talk or something?” Emma asked, struggling to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
He made an irritated noise. “Look. With everything you’ve gone through, maybe it’s not surprising that you’re not acting rational. Which is—it’s fine. I can handle things.”
He had always been the steady one, the optimistic one. The sane one. She had always gone along with what Nathan deemed to be the best. He was the one with the healthy relationship with his parents, the one who had managed to finish high school, get a degree, keep friends for more than six months at a time. Now she felt like she was falling apart more than ever, and maybe he was right. Maybe she wasn’t being rational.
“There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about that’s kind of related,” he went on. He put a hand against the counter, the other braced against his hip. His gaze was searching. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go into town. I can run all the errands and things. You should stay at the house.”
“Why?” Emma asked, instantly bristling. “There’s tons to do. It doesn’t make sense for one of us to be stuck here.”
“I don’t like the idea of people gossiping because they saw you out buying milk, or whatever. Getting home and calling their girlfriends to go ‘Oh, remember that psycho teen Emma Palmer, I saw her in the Stop & Shop.’” He put on a mocking little falsetto.
“People aren’t going to stop talking just because I don’t leave the house,” Emma countered. He sounded like her mother, always worried about what everyone else thought. “You aren’t going to leave the house looking like that, are you?”
He threw a hand in the air. “Emma, I am living here. I am in this house, in this town, I am here even after you lied to me about all of this. Can you not do this one thing for me? For fuck’s sake. After everything you’ve put me through the last few weeks—”
“Everything I’ve put you through?” Emma asked. “I’m not the only one who screwed up, Nathan. And I’m not going to be a prisoner in this house because you’re worried about gossip.” The heat in her voice surprised her.
He looked at her with a baffled expression. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” he said. “You’re not acting like yourself. Last night, and now this.”
No, she wasn’t acting like herself—not the Emma that he knew, at least. Not the Emma she had created painstakingly, a rebuke to the girl she had been. But now she was home, and that old Emma had been waiting for her here the whole time. A ghost in this house.
Nathan didn’t know that Emma. The one who always chose to fight instead of surrender, the one who was contrary and clever and sometimes cruel. He knew the soft Emma, the quiet Emma, the version who would bend and bend and bend and never break.
“Emma. I love you. I only want to do what’s best for you. For us.” He reached out, a sudden movement that made her flinch, and pulled her in toward him again. She surrendered and murmured a wordless agreement.
He said he wanted what was best for them. But this time, he was wrong. She couldn’t keep hiding from what had happened. She had to know. For herself. For her child. For any hope of a future.
“I’ll stay in. I won’t leave,” she said, lying as she had so many times before.
14
DAPHNE
Now
Dale had slipped away peacefully and on schedule. Daphne left her apartment in Colorado for Arden Hills the next day, arriving around the time that an embalmer was slitting open Dale’s veins and shoving in a tube, swapping blood for formalin.
Daphne kept a tiny one-bedroom cottage in town, a few miles away from her childhood home. She’d unpacked her suitcase immediately, putting her clothes away tidily in the drawers. Whenever she traveled, she liked to do that right away. It was a way of having standards. One of her mother’s favorite words, though she meant something different by it.
For Daphne, it wasn’t about appearances, it was about reminding herself that she had value; that wherever she was, she belonged. She’d bought this house when she was twenty-one, newly married, her new last name on all the paperwork. The marriage hadn’t lasted; it hadn’t been meant to last. Jonathan had walked away with a sizable chunk of her money, but she’d kept the cottage. It was hers in a way few things were.
Before she’d left Colorado, she’d gotten a new haircut—sharp, straight bangs and a bob—and a new oak-brown color. It wasn’t the most flattering, but it changed her face, making her look even less like little Daphne Palmer than the years and weight already had. When she’d walked past the house yesterday, in fact, Nathan had been collecting the mail out front. She’d almost turned around, but instead she’d walked right past him and nodded and said good morning, and he’d offered only a bland greeting in return before heading back inside.
It had encouraged her enough that she’d gone back this morning. This time, she had a dog with her—Winston, a small gray terrier, getting on in years. Not hers, of course. She’d been a dog walker in Arden Hills under her married name for years. She was good at it, the way she was good at all of her work, and her clients were always thrilled when she was back in town.
Dogs were easy. You just had to work out what they wanted—love, treats, praise—and make them understand what you wanted. A simple matter of communication. She’d messaged her regular clients and had her week booked before she even got into town. It was relaxing work in between her human clients, a way to spend a few weeks or a month or two resetting before she entered into the world of another family’s grief again.
Besides, people didn’t look twice at a fat woman walking a small dog, she’d found, sometimes not even once, and it gave her a plausible excuse to be strolling through the neighborhood.
With Winston in tow early in the morning, she had spotted Nathan’s car pulling out of the driveway. He’d left the gate open behind him, and she knew she shouldn’t, but curiosity got the better of her. She went in through the gate, turning off to the side quickly so no one would see her from the street. She left Winston behind the carriage house, dropping him a few treats to keep him content—he wouldn’t wander off, she’d trained him well over the years—and stole around to the back door of the house. A glance through the windows didn’t turn up any sign of Emma.
The back door proved unlocked. She remembered it creaked when fully opened, so she sidled herself through instead and stood in her parents’ kitchen, waiting for memory to overwhelm her. It didn’t. She felt almost disappointed at the discovery. She’d built this place up so much in her mind.
There was a phone on the counter, plugged in to charge. Daphne turned on the screen. The photo was of Nathan, grinning; the background was a beach. A vacation, maybe. It looked a few years old. Next to it was a bottle of prenatal vitamins. Daphne let out a little ah—all this urgency suddenly made more sense.
She looked through the cupboards briefly, noting the saltines and ginger candies. She listened for any sign of movement, but there was none, so she risked slipping her shoes off and stealing deeper into the house. Everything smelled of dust and cleaning products. The drawers of the credenza in the great room were all opened, the contents heaped or dumped in a trash bag beside it; someone was clearing things out. A little shiver of anxiety went through her. Was there anything left in the house to find?
No. Surely not.