“We?” she repeated.
“Me and Nina. When you took off, I figured you were just going to cut through the woods and go home, but she was freaked-out. Wanted to make sure you were safe. So we drove around a bit to see if we could spot you. We were out there for what—forty minutes, maybe? An hour? Nina was fucking pissed. I was just about to call it when we saw you. You don’t remember any of this?”
No point in lying to him now, though she realized she should have let him think she remembered at least part of it. Leave him uncertain what he could lie about. “It’s patchy,” she said, and she could tell he didn’t believe her.
“You were walking on the side of the road. Barefoot. Soaked through. You were fucked-up, like I said. Barely making sense.”
“What did I say?” JJ asked, throat tight enough to hurt.
“I don’t remember,” he hedged, and she made a skeptical noise. “You weren’t making sense. Nothing you said meant anything, as far as I’m concerned.”
“What did I say?” JJ demanded.
“You said someone was dead. ‘They’re dead.’ And you kept apologizing,” he said. “We didn’t know what had happened. We just thought you were high. Figured we should let you sleep it off. So I took you back to my place. We stayed there awhile, and then I drove you home.”
“That part I remember,” JJ said. Waking up in his bed, musty sheets tangled around her legs. Her hair still wet—it had always been so thick, so slow to dry. Logan telling her to get up. Get moving. Get in the car. Get out of the car. Brusque in a way she hadn’t understood. She figured she’d done something. Said something. There was a weird taste in her mouth, metallic. Noises were too loud and strangely muffled, and she was gripped with the feeling that she was running from something, but she couldn’t remember what.
She’d been so exhausted, her thoughts so muddied, that she hadn’t even thought to sneak around the back of the house when Logan dropped her off. She just stumbled up the front drive and in through the door. She heard her sisters’ voices and followed them.
Then the rest. Memory snapping back into her mind. Yellow wallpaper. White grip. Red hand.
“You were with Nina? The whole time, before you found me?” she asked.
“Yeah.” It was almost a question.
“You weren’t with me.”
“No, Juliette, I wasn’t with you,” he said, angry now at having to repeat himself. “Whatever the fuck you did that night, you did it without me.”
She wrapped an arm over her ribs, took a drag from the cigarette, and tried to decide if she was disappointed. She needed the answers. She didn’t know if she wanted them. “Did you have your gun with you that night?”
“What? No,” he said. Shot her a glance that bordered on alarm. She was losing him. The momentary camaraderie between them was guttering out as he realized—remembered—the depth of the trouble she carried with her.
“Where was it?” she asked.
“Why do you want to know?” he demanded. Not angry—scared. Confused.
“You’re not stupid, Logan. You know enough of that answer to know you don’t want to hear the rest,” she said. “Tell me where the gun was and I’ll walk away right now. I won’t talk to you again and you won’t have to know anything that makes you uncomfortable.”
“Fuck,” he said. “You have changed.”
“Adapt or die, right?” JJ said. She gave him a minute. Let him look off into the distance and take a drag of his cigarette and tell himself he was in control—of this situation, of his life, of some corner of the universe. It was a lie everyone had to believe at least a little to get from one moment to the next.
“I’ve been waiting to get asked about that night for a long time. You and your sister weren’t the ones I thought would be doing the asking,” he said at last. His expression was shuttered when he looked at her again. “I’ve done fine without you around, Juliette. I like fine. Fine is all I could ever hope for out of life, and I don’t want to fuck it up. You got questions, find someone else to answer them.”
“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.