Cassie looked back at her. “What are you doing here?”
“Uh, I work here,” Sorrow said.
“Not here, god, I mean here. In town. What are you even doing back here?”
“I’m visiting my mother and grandmother,” Sorrow said. Her heart was thudding painfully. She shouldn’t have said anything. She didn’t know why she had to say anything. “Not that it’s any of your business. Why do you care?”
“Are you kidding me? After all the shit your family has done to mine?”
“I don’t know what—” Sorrow’s voice was shaking now, a tremble in her throat and in her lungs. “I don’t know what you mean. What did I ever do to you?”
Cassie stepped forward so fast Sorrow stumbled backward, knocked her elbow into a clothing rack. Ellie said, “Cassie, come on,” and reached for her sleeve, but Cassie twisted out of reach. Mrs. Roche was watching, wide-eyed, her lips shaped into a soft O. Sorrow didn’t lose her balance, didn’t fall, but still she felt a wash of vertigo, as though the floor were tilting beneath her and the walls changing around them, rippling like water, shifting from colorful to dark, from bright to shadowed.
She blinked rapidly, steadied herself, and Cassie was right in front of her.
“You know, it’s almost been normal around here,” Cassie said, jabbing her finger at Sorrow, stopping just short of touching her. “With you gone and your mom finally on some fucking meds—”
“Holy shit, Cass,” Kavita said.
“But now you’re back and everybody is all, oh, look at her, how brave she is to come back after such a terrible tragedy, boo-fucking-hoo, like they’ve all forgotten that there wouldn’t have been a tragedy if your sister hadn’t been a complete psycho going around setting shit on fire for fun.”
The floor dropped from beneath Sorrow. There was a roar in her ears, thunderous as a storm, but every one of Cassie’s words came through clearly.
“What?”
“Oh, please,” Cassie said, rolling her eyes. “Like anybody believes that stupid story about a stranger setting those fires. Awfully convenient they could never find him.”
“You don’t—you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sorrow’s hands were shaking; she clenched them into fists at her sides. “My sister didn’t—she wasn’t like that. Patience didn’t do that.”
“Oh my god, you’re just as delusional as the rest of your family,” Cassie said. “It must be nice to live so far fucking removed from reality. I just hope you don’t like playing with matches too.”
Cassie swept toward the door before Sorrow could respond. She dragged Ellie outside, and they were shapes beyond the glass, silhouetted against the evening sun, and they were gone.
Kavita let out a short breath. “I, um . . .”
Mrs. Roche said, “Oh, my goodness. That was—well.”
Sorrow’s head was pounding and her skin was prickling all over. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. She had known Patience. That wasn’t the kind of thing a person could forget. She might forget a day or a string of them, names and faces, but she hadn’t forgotten the shape of who Patience had been. Sorrow had known her own sister.
“I don’t know about that girl,” Mrs. Roche said. She muttered something else, an excuse and a good-bye, and she was gone too.
Somewhere beneath the shock and embarrassment and creeping anger, Sorrow knew Mrs. Roche was probably racing away to tell everybody she knew what she had just seen. The Abrams girl and the Lovegood girl, right there in the store, you should have seen. The whole town would hear about it.
Kavita began, “So that was—”
Before she could finish, Mahesh stuck his head out from the back room. “What was that? Was somebody here?”
Kavita glared at him. “Wow, seriously, could you be more clueless?”
“What? I thought I heard somebody,” he said.
“Your stalker was here, along with Cassie, who totally just flipped out on Sorrow here for . . . something.” Kavita looked at Sorrow. “I take it you guys weren’t friends back in the day.”
She was striving for an easy tone, like Sorrow wasn’t rigid as a statue beside her, still gaping at the door where Cassie had just left. Sorrow made herself take a breath, then another. She opened her hands, flexed her stiff fingers, imagined she heard them creaking like tree branches.
“No,” she said. “We didn’t even know each other.” But that wasn’t right. That wasn’t how it worked between their families. They had been forbidden from speaking to each other, but they had known each other, the way trees on opposite sides of a fence could grow together for centuries, roots and branches intertwined. “We weren’t friends. And what she said, it’s not true.”
A long pause. Kavita leaned against the counter.
“What?” Sorrow said. “Have you heard that from other people?”
“No,” Kavita said quickly. “I mean, yeah, we’ve heard about the fire. And your sister. Ethan told us about it. But not what Cassie said.”
“What did Cassie say?” Mahesh asked.
Kavita ignored him. “It must’ve been really hard,” she went on, slowly, like she was giving Sorrow a chance to speak.
Sorrow looked down at the floor, stared unseeing at the carpet.
“I can—no.” Kavita stopped herself. “No. I can’t imagine what that was like. I can’t imagine it at all. It must have been terrible.”
Sorrow managed a nod, a faint “Yeah,” scraped from her throat, but she didn’t know what else to say. Since she had arrived in town she had been bracing herself for the recognition, for the moment when eyes lit up with understanding and lips pursed with unspoken words: Oh, she’s that girl, the other Lovegood girl, the one they sent away after—you know. Mrs. Abrams, Mrs. Roche, they had both proved it true. They looked at Sorrow and saw not a sixteen-year-old girl visiting family for summer vacation, but the echo of a tragedy.
But she hadn’t expected this. She wanted to run after Cassie and call her a liar, grab her and shake her and make her admit Patience could never have started the fire that killed her. She could refute what Cassie had said until she was blue in the face. She could shout it from the rooftops and prove true everybody’s suspicions about the Lovegood family’s lack of sanity.
But she had no proof. She didn’t even remember the fire.
She wanted Cassie to be wrong. She wanted it to be a lie.
But she didn’t know.
11
KAVITA AND MAHESH dropped Sorrow off at the end of the driveway, and she walked up to the house through the tunnel of maple trees. Ethan’s Jeep was still parked in the driveway, and inside Grandma and Verity were fixing dinner.
“We got a bit of a late start,” Verity said. “Chicken pot pie in about forty-five minutes. Go tell Ethan he’s staying for dinner.” She was scrubbing a cutting board in the sink, her hair drifting about her face in wisps.
Sorrow hesitated. She had been bracing for questions about her day, thinking of ways to answer without mentioning Mrs. Roche or Cassie Abrams.
But Verity only looked up and added, “I think he’s in the barn. Okay?”