“It keeps you?” Cade repeated. His heart sunk. His mother was right. She wasn’t well today.
“It keeps me calm. It’s Zen medicine.” She giggled, but the sound was loose and strange, like whatever had been holding her together was undone.
“Do they have to put you on so much medicine, Jeni?” Cade asked.
She stopped laughing. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” he repeated. He sister wasn’t his sister anymore. It was just like the last time they’d spoken. And the time before. And the time before that. She was an echo. An empty shell with the same name and the same voice.
But it wasn’t her.
“Cade?” Her voice was mouse-tiny.
“Yeah, Jeni?”
She sounded muffled and tight, and he realized she was crying. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
Cade swallowed hard. “I still love you, Jens.”
“I love you too.”
But then there was some shuffling, and his mother was on the line again. “Cade, you know you can’t upset her like that! The doctors say emotional trauma is what triggers her episodes. Now she’ll have to miss her shift tomorrow in the kitchens. We have to go.”
“Okay, um, can you tell her that—”
But it was too late.
The line was already dead.
Cade stood up and threw his phone angrily into the couch cushions. It bounced off and hit the floorboards, but he didn’t move to pick it up. He crossed to the opposite side of the game room, where there were two large dartboards. A few rogue darts lay along the bottom of the baseboard. He picked them up, collecting seven before returning to a thin blue line painted neatly onto the floorboards.
He threw one. It stuck in the outer edge of the board.
It hadn’t just been a phone call.
He threw another. It bounced off and hit the floor.
The third got the slightest bit closer. It stuck, precariously, along the very edge, and then fell to the floor.
He was looking at his future.
Cade had been there when it happened. He had been there when his sister killed their cousin. He had tried to stop her, but she had a knife and there was blood. A vast, incredible amount of blood that was spilling out of Andrew’s chest, and his sister, screaming and screaming and screaming while his cousin convulsed on the floor.
And died.
Just like Stratford.
Angrily, he threw another dart. It hit the target near the center.
The next two were even closer.
Money was his family’s legacy. But now so was this. The rage. The insanity.
And the murders.
One minute his sister was fine, and then she was odd, looking at movements in the air, taking pills from plastic prescription bottles, and then she was a killer.
That was why she was gone. The choice had been prison or a hospital for the criminally insane, and Jeni was in no shape for prison. She was manic, wild with happiness one moment, weeping the next, and practically shivering with rage in the space of an hour. And then she would have days where she was happy. Kind.
Normal.
And now Cade was her. She was the reason why his father was so harsh with him. Why he had been sent back to the psychiatrist. She was the reason his family had split into two separate units of perpetual disrepair.
And now he was doing the same thing.
He had killed someone.
He was a murderer. And he had been a prisoner in his own family for some time.
For the first time, guilt seeped through the walls he had erected and found its way into his brain. It seeped slowly through his blood until it found his heart and made a nest there.
For the first time, Cade wanted to tell someone.
He threw the last dart.
It didn’t make it to the board. It bounced off the wall and clattered to the floor.
Cade didn’t pick it up.
Ivy
Saturday, July 4
Ivy strolled down the street, watching the black car trail her.
When she went into the coffee shop for a chocolate chip frappe, it parked and waited for her. When she sauntered into the clothing store, it did the same.
She knew who was in the car. She knew who was behind the dark windshield. She recognized it by the state license plate and the small white scratch on the hood where someone had keyed it.
It was her brother’s car.
Daniel.
She pretended not to notice him following her. It wasn’t until she sauntered down to a café, ordered a piece of Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, and opened a book that he finally left the vehicle, looking left and right repeatedly as he crossed the street, like he was afraid of being followed.
Inside the café, he sat down at the little table across from Ivy.
“Hey, Ivy. Happy Fourth.”
“Hello.” Ivy was very polite. She carefully cut off the tip of the triangular piece of cake. It was sweet and moist and thick and perfect, and her favorite since she was a little girl. She’d tried to get the recipe many times, but the restaurant owner claimed it was a family secret.
“Can we talk?” Daniel put his right ankle on his left knee. His foot jiggled. It was what their father did when he was nervous. Daniel had inherited the habit.