It wasn’t.
When Jill finally stopped digging and bowed her head to weep, Jack put a hand on her shoulder. Jill looked up, shaking, broken. She had never learned the art of thinking for herself.
I made the right choice, and I am so sorry I left you, thought Jack. Aloud, she said, “Come.”
Jill stood. When Jack took her hand, she did not resist.
The door was locked. The key Jack carried in her pocket—the key she had been carrying for five long years—fit it perfectly. It turned, and the door opened, and they were, in the strictest and most academic of senses, home.
The house they had lived in for the first twelve years of their lives (not the house they had grown up in, no; they had aged there, but they had so rarely grown) was familiar and alien at the same time, like walking through a storybook. The carpet was too soft beneath feet accustomed to stone castle floors and hard-packed earth; the air smelled of sickly-sweetness, instead of fresh flowers or honest chemicals. By the time they reached the ground floor, they were walking so close together that it didn’t matter if their hands never touched; they were still conjoined.
There was a light in the dining room. They followed it and found their parents sitting at the table, along with a small, impeccably groomed boy. They stopped in the doorway, both of them looking in bemusement at this small closed circle of a family.
Serena noticed them first. She shrieked, jumping from her chair. “Chester!”
Chester turned, opening his mouth to yell at the intruders. But one of the girls was covered in blood, and they both looked as if they had been crying, and something about them …
“Jacqueline?” he whispered. “Jillian?”
And the two girls clung to each other and wept, as outside the rain came down like a punishment, and nothing would ever be the same.