She looked toward the stairs. She had been expecting since she stepped through the gates to be confronted. For Emma to stand in front of her, arms crossed, steel in her eyes—but that was the old Emma, wasn’t it? This Emma didn’t stand firm, she vanished. She receded.
Daphne walked slowly up the stairs, old habit guiding her feet past the places that creaked and sighed. At the top she paused, looking toward the smaller rooms where she and her sisters had slept. Nearly identical, except for the color of the stripes on the walls. And that had been the goal—three girls, identically perfect, distinguished by the color of their hair. Juliette’s dark, Emma’s auburn, Daphne’s wheat-colored, wearing matching white dresses with ribbons at their waists. They had photos from every year just like that. Emma squirmed and made faces through every session, but their mother always managed to find the one in which it seemed as if they were all cooperating, a fraction of a second’s shutter-click securing the illusion of success.
Emma had rebelled; Juliette had conformed and performed her part. Daphne had tried to be invisible, until one day she couldn’t be. Even now, she felt small again, standing in this place. She pressed a hand against her chest, feeling the steady thump of her heart and the strength of her own flesh. She was not that sprig of a girl anymore.
But there was still utility in being invisible, she thought, and padded toward the master bedroom. The door was open a crack. She pushed it open farther and there was Emma, sleeping on her side on top of the covers wearing a T-shirt and shorts. She looked gaunt, Daphne thought, her skin sallow. She wasn’t eating enough.
“Poor thing,” Daphne said under her breath. She stood over her sister, watching her chest rise and fall, waiting for Emma’s eyes to flutter open. She’d be caught. She would have to explain. There would be a joyous reunion—an angry confrontation—a confession, at last, overdue. The possibilities presented themselves one by one, and one by one they faded. Emma slept on.
Daphne drew away, half-reluctant and half-relieved. It wasn’t time yet, she told herself. There were still things she needed to take care of before Emma could know that she was here.
She should leave, she knew. But before she did, she got down a loaf of bread and popped a slice in the toaster, started a pot of coffee to brew. Eating first thing, before even getting out of bed, helped with nausea, and there was nothing like the scent of coffee to make going downstairs less of a chore. While the bread was toasting she picked up Emma’s phone, considered a moment, and entered four numbers to unlock it. It worked right away. Nathan’s birthday.
Daphne wondered if Emma understood that using her husband’s birthday wasn’t a sign of how much she loved him but its opposite. For someone else it might have been a gesture of affection, but for Emma, Daphne thought, it was a way of reassuring herself that Nathan was the center of her world. And she wouldn’t need reassurance if it were true.
Emma certainly wasn’t the center of his world. That much had become clear, however well he thought he had covered his tracks. Anger burbled inside her. Emma deserved better. Daphne would never understand how her sister had let herself settle for a man like Nathan.
Daphne found the location tracking app easily. She checked the usage statistics—it hadn’t been opened in the last three months. Perfect. She entered her own information, confirmed the link on her phone, and granted herself permission to track Emma’s location. Then she closed the app, turned off the phone, and positioned it exactly where Emma had left it. Another quick trip to put the toast on Emma’s nightstand—and then Daphne took a risk, and leaned over, pressing the softest kiss against Emma’s brow before retreating. Emma, deep in sleep, did not stir.
She looked peaceful, Daphne thought as she exited the house. But you could see the signs of sickness in her. That was what all of this was; a restfulness that concealed infirmity. It couldn’t last.
She walked back to where Winston was waiting, tongue lolling out. She gave the carriage house one long look. The door was locked, with no other good way to get in. She’d have to leave it for now. At least she felt better now, with Emma’s location easily accessed. Hopefully it would prove an unnecessary precaution. But Emma had always been curious. Her artist’s eye quick to pick up on things out of place. And if she started to see the things that had been hidden all this time …
Daphne shook her head, making her way quickly back to the street with Winston trotting alongside her. It wouldn’t happen that way. Daphne would be there, to shape what happened next.
And she would do whatever she had to.
15
EMMA
Then
Two months, more or less, before she burns her sister’s bloody clothes in the fireplace grate of an abandoned house, Emma stands examining a painting.
It has taken half a year of pleading to convince Emma’s parents to let her buy oil paints. She has made do with acrylics and watercolor, but she glories in the romance of the oils. She researches their origins and ingredients, imagining herself the painter of older eras, grinding pigments from minerals and roots, mixing them into the oil herself. Her paints come, of course, from tubes, purchased with her carefully hoarded money one color at a time, so that the bloom of new hues across her canvases become a way to mark the march of time.
Lorelei teaches her. The hardest part is the patience, waiting for each layer to dry, unfinished, the promise of possibility shimmering in her mind’s eye. Her mother hates the stink of it—the oil, the turpentine. The way it stains her fingers and her clothes, splatters and lines of paint crawling up her forearms, decorating her face. There is nothing ladylike and pristine about painting. She emerges streaked in umber and sienna, cadmium and vermilion.
Her work is always sloppier, clumsier than she would like. She rushes; she waits too long; the paint cracks, it smears. Lorelei tells her patience, patience. Worry when it looks perfect, because that means you’ve caught up with your own ambition and judgment. Dissatisfaction is the engine of creativity.
Lorelei is the one who encouraged Emma to consider schools farther from home. She has a talent, but that’s not what Lorelei prizes. The girl has drive, the kind of hunger that won’t be sated until she has the chance to give herself over to it completely, and that means instruction, proper instruction, more than Lorelei can give her. She needs to be surrounded by other people as hungry and obsessed as she is. The schools she tells Emma about are in Georgia, California, even Europe. Emma says again and again that she has to stay close to home, but the hunger says otherwise.
Emma has filled out the applications. It’s absurdly early, she knows, but she wants the essays and forms out of the way so that she can focus on her portfolio. She needs eight—wants ten. She has, over the last year, managed seven she deems adequate. Three watercolors, two in acrylics, one in charcoal, and one, the painting of Juliette at her piano, in oil.