She’d expected it to feel that way, but now that she was standing here, it felt more like walking into an unfamiliar hotel room than wading into the past. With a sudden surge of energy, she grabbed hold of the bedspread and yanked, pulling it off the bed and letting it fall in a heap.
“Help me, will you?” she asked. Together they stripped the bed. She marched to the hall closet, where she found a set of linens, stale-smelling but serviceable, and made up the bed again, fresh. She stared at it. Nodded once. Looked at Nathan. “This is our house now. Until we leave, it’s ours, not theirs. What happened here doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. That’s the only way this works.” The only way she could bear it.
“Okay,” he said immediately, though his eyes were troubled.
She walked back out into the hall. The sacred, forbidden places of her sisters’ rooms, she invaded, flinging open each one in turn. The soft yellow stripes of Juliette’s room and the pale green of Daphne’s. Chosen, of course, by their mother. Daphne’s closet was open and cleared out, and with a jolt Emma realized she must have come back at some point for her things.
She opened Juliette’s closet, but most of her clothes were still there—all pale pastels and whites, delicate filmy dresses and cashmere cardigans. They all had clothes like that, but Juliette was the only one who would have picked them out on her own. She patiently straightened her hair each morning, taming its wild waves, or braided it into an orderly plait. She dressed in skirts and white stockings and used only the soft shimmer of lip gloss their mother approved of, tiny silver studs in her ears that she had waited for her thirteenth birthday to get. She practiced piano dutifully for an hour every day, two hours on Sundays, and never made excuses to get out of going to church.
Juliette had been the perfect daughter. Everything that Emma couldn’t be. It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. For years she’d contorted herself to fit into the mold that her mother wanted, but she’d failed. No matter how hard she worked at it, she was scrappy and sloppy and sharp-tongued and devious and unladylike, and finally she’d broken. If she was going to be the bad daughter no matter what she did, then she’d do whatever she liked.
And all the while, Juliette had yes, Mother-ed and no, Mother-ed her way into the golden light of her parents’ approval. Never strayed a step out of line.
Except …
Emma stared at the orderly line of Mary Janes and ballet flats in the closet, and she thought of that night. Juliette stumbling through the door, her feet bare, her hair soaked, her clothes dry. Not her clothes. Clothes that Emma had never once seen her wear—a black tank top, an oversize red flannel button-up, black jeans that clung to her like a second skin.
“Your sisters,” Nathan said from the doorway. She looked up, her mind scrambling for purchase, reorienting to the here and now.
“My sisters?” she repeated.
“Is this why you’re estranged?” he asked. He hesitated. “Do they think that you…?”
He was an easy man to read, Nathan. It had always comforted her. But now, she wished she could believe his lie. Believe that he believed. But it was there in his eyes, that glistening doubt. The maybe of it all, the what if.
Maybe she did do it.
What could she say? I don’t know if they think that I did it. She thought Daphne must. When Emma had come for her, riding in on her white horse—well, a twenty-year-old sedan that coughed and rattled—meaning to whisk her away from her foster home, Daphne had refused to even come to the door. Emma had sent the wedding invitation in a fit of vain hope—the same reason she sent birthday and Christmas cards every year, only giving up when she started getting Juliette’s back with No Longer at This Address written in her sister’s perfect handwriting.
But Daphne had shown up, she and Christopher Best—“an old family friend,” she’d told Nathan, which was technically true—joining an anemic trickle of friends to fill out Emma’s side of the church. Daphne had spoken to no one, and at the end of the evening had fixed Emma with a look and said, “I’d hoped for more from you.” And then she’d left.
Maybe they thought she’d done it, and that was why they had abandoned her.
Or maybe it was not because of blame, but guilt.
Blood drying on the hallway floor.
Juliette in a stranger’s clothes.
Daphne, her sleeves soaked with blood, sleeping soundly in the tree house.
She hadn’t known what happened. She hadn’t wanted to know. She had taken care of it. She had accepted the suspicion, had even leaned into it at times, to pull the attention away from her sisters.
They had paid her back by abandoning her. And now Nathan was looking at her with that quavering light in his eyes. With all the questions that she had choked on all those years ago. He wouldn’t ever say it. But he would think it, every day. And eventually, he would walk away, just like Juliette. Just like Daphne.
She would be alone again. It was only a matter of time, unless she could make him believe.
But how could she, when there was still so much she’d kept from him?
* * *
The morning after they arrived in Arden Hills, Emma sat across the kitchen table, in the seat that had once been her mother’s. She’d sat there each morning with her reading glasses at the end of her nose, doing the crossword puzzle in pearls. It is important, she always said, to keep one’s mind sharp.
She said it that way, too. One’s mind. She always talked like that, with a stiff precision she believed elevated her. She did not believe that achieving a certain station in life meant she could relax her standards, and shook her head at the women she called her friends who wore sweatpants in public despite the diamonds on their wrists.
Nathan was opening drawers in the kitchen, determined to sort and catalog every item in this place. She was reluctant to get rid of anything, but he insisted that rusted can openers and ancient packs of sandwich bags, at least, could go. She had taken charge of a box of papers, sitting at the kitchen table and searching for any documents that might prove important.
The windows set in the back door were filthy. She could barely make out the trees in the back. She couldn’t see the tree house at all. If it was still there. Go far enough past the tree house, and you got to the old house in the woods, its roof long rotted, its walls home to countless generations of small animals. Stark photographs of the graffiti-covered walls and the refuse-choked fireplace had been splashed all over the papers, after what the police found there. Some kid had drawn a pentacle on the wall at some point in the past, and suddenly Emma had a “known association with Satanism.”
“Why did people suspect you?” Nathan asked, startling her. He was frowning at the paperwork. “There must have been a reason, right?”
“It’s complicated.” She wetted her lips, looking away. Her eyes fix on a discolored patch of crown molding. She wondered if it was water damage. She had no idea what shape the house was in. Gabriel hadn’t said anything about there being major damage, but he hadn’t mentioned the graffiti, either. Though the last time he’d sent any kind of update was at least a year ago. The emails were always short, impersonal. She never replied. She assumed he preferred it that way. “It’s okay. You can wonder. Everyone does. If it matters, I didn’t do it.”
“If it matters? Of course it matters if you killed your parents,” Nathan said, appalled.
“I mean if it matters that I say so. I’ve said it all along, and it hasn’t stopped people from assuming that I’m lying. No, I didn’t kill my parents. No, I wasn’t in the house when they died. No, I don’t know who killed them.”