“Then who did?” Gabriel asked. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Not yet, at least—not until she was sure what that answer should be. Gabriel didn’t let the silence last long. When he spoke, it was carefully, each word like a bead slipped onto a string. “I think the way things are right now, people have a story that finally makes sense. Three mysteries with one answer. You start picking that apart, and none of it is going to feel as solid.”
It was what Daphne had given them—a way out. Rick Hadley was not an innocent man. He was not a good man. He had killed Kenneth Mahoney, slept with his best friend’s wife, hounded Emma and her sisters relentlessly. He would have killed them by the river, Emma thought—he had no way out with them alive. Once he knew where the drive was, they would have died.
Rick Hadley got what he deserved.
And Nathan?
She wasn’t sure how much she believed Daphne’s version of what had happened. That she’d only grabbed the gun because he was pointing it at her; that shooting him had been more an accident than anything else.
But all the things Nathan had said about her, all the things he’d been planning? That, she believed.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Emma asked. She sounded young, she thought. She sounded sixteen again.
“You can tell me,” he said.
“I don’t think I loved my husband,” Emma said. It was, finally, the reason she could never figure out when she’d fallen in love with him. The simplest answer possible, really, but she’d convinced herself otherwise—had stopped even asking the question. “I know that’s awful. He’s dead. He didn’t deserve it.”
“Love? Or dying?” Gabriel asked.
“Maybe neither,” Emma said.
“I think…” Gabriel said slowly, “I think that you should consider what it is that you deserve, Emma. What you want.”
What did she want?
The same things she always had, she thought. Her sisters. A home she wasn’t afraid of. A life spent without looking over her shoulder.
The boy who had never treated her like an intruder, even when she felt like one.
She got down from the table. She approached Gabriel with steps as careful and intentional as his words, and took his hand. There, in the dark, she looked at him, meeting his gaze steadily. And then she rose on the tips of her toes and pressed her lips to his.
The kiss lasted only a moment. His hand on her waist, her thumb against his jaw. Then she sank back down. “I have to go,” she said.
“Emma.” She didn’t understand how her name on his lips could have that kind of power, to mean a thousand things at once. It was a question, an invitation, a plea.
“We keep getting the timing wrong,” she said, stepping away.
“Maybe next time,” he told her.
“Next time,” she echoed. She turned and slipped away into the dark. She drove home carefully, along the winding roads with their blind turns and dark stretches between the homes. You paid a premium for privacy on this side of Arden Hills, for the luxury of secrets.
She pulled through the gate. It was left open now, unlocked. It had never been protection for anyone here. The danger never came from the road. She walked inside and found her sisters waiting for her. The three of them stood in the foyer. JJ, her mascara making shadows under her eyes, her hair a dark cloud around her head. Daphne, with her calm intensity. And Emma.
“All right,” Emma said. She took a breath. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Now
The best thing Nathan ever did was contribute half his genetic material to the child currently giggling in Daphne’s lap. Baby Wren had a full head of brown curls when she was born and exquisitely chubby limbs. JJ had at first been skeptical, but the day Wren learned to smile, JJ was a goner.
And Emma? Daphne knew to the instant when her sister had fallen in love—at the very first look. The first touch. Daphne had never seen Emma smile the way she had when she held her daughter in her arms.
Wren was six months old now, with dimpled cheeks and a single tooth starting to force its way rudely out of her gums. She had a tendency to drool on her auntie Daphne’s shoulder, but Daphne reflected that her three most recent careers—nurse, dog walker, and now occasional nanny to her utterly delightful niece—required a high tolerance for bodily fluids.
Right now they were in the sunroom, recently refreshed with new furniture that was less likely to jab a spur of wicker into curious palms. Vic and JJ were visiting; Gabriel was coming by later for dinner. The house was more alive than it had been in years.
Gabriel was spending quite a lot of time at the house, in fact. And when he wasn’t at the house, Emma was often with him. They hadn’t gone out on a date quite yet. Eighteen months, Daphne was guessing—that’s how long it would take for Emma to start feeling like she could live life post-Nathan properly. Personally, Daphne would have given the man six months tops, but she recognized that Emma had a certain attachment to him.
It really was for the best that he was gone. Something had to be done.
And people were so rarely willing to do it.
Like her mother. Daphne had known as soon as her father made that call that something terrible was going to happen. She’d gone to her mother, woken her up out of her deep sleep—her stupor, really. She’d told her that he had the drive, that he knew. Something had to be done. But her mother was in denial. She thought she could talk him down. Daphne knew she was wrong. And she knew where her mother kept the gun that Rick Hadley had given her—the gun he’d taken from Logan Ellis.
She’d stood on her tiptoes and lifted the gun high to shoot him. The kickback had hurt her wrists, but she’d been worried that they would be able to tell it was someone short who’d done it. She needn’t have worried so much; CSI turned out not to be terribly representative of small-town police departments.
Part of her had expected her mother to thank her. Instead, Irene Palmer had stared at her with no expression at all, and then told her to hand over the gun and get out. So Daphne had done what she was told. Until she heard the second shot.
She had to protect them. All of them. Something had to be done, and she’d done it.
It was why she’d done everything. For her and for her sisters. To protect them. Nothing else mattered. No one else mattered. It was Emma and Juliette and Daphne—and Wren.
But they were safe now. All of them. There were no more questions to ask, only answers, neat and final. Maybe there would be some trouble if Hadley ever woke up, but the odds of that were vanishingly low.
Really, someone ought to put him out of his misery.
“Misery, misery, misery,” Daphne crooned, bouncing Wren on her knee. The baby laughed, hands wrapped tightly around Daphne’s index fingers.
* * *
Emma watched Daphne cooing at Wren, Wren laughing uproariously. It was hard to know which of them was more delighted.
The whole house was coming together, piece by piece. At first, they fully intended to put in the work and then sell it, but as the weeks turned into months, they had stopped talking about that possibility as much. Vic and JJ spent as much time here as they did at home. The wallpaper was gone; the hardwoods patched; the study converted into a second master bedroom. Gabriel was even helping to put in an en suite, stealing some square footage from the ostentatiously useless great room.
“She’s good with kids,” JJ noted, hands in her back pockets, a smile curling at the corner of her mouth. Emma turned toward her.
“I don’t know what I would do without her to help,” she confessed. And she didn’t.
Daphne was a wonder, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her family. Wren included. Emma knew that.
She knew other things, too.
She knew that her mother was entirely capable of murder.
She also knew that her mother was the kind of woman with an exit plan. She wasn’t like Emma. If she had decided to kill her husband, she would have had a way out afterward.
She knew that Daphne was still keeping secrets.
But no one could ever really know another person, could they? Everyone had secrets.
JJ was in the sunroom now, pulling faces at Wren. Emma looked around the house. She’d tried to run from this place, but it had always been her home. Their home. It belonged to them, and they belonged to one another.
And that was all she needed to know.
Emma smiled, and went to join her sisters.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS