Sorrow felt something pull inside her chest, a dense knot that was part jealousy, part yearning.
Julie wasn’t looking at her. “All we ever talked about was how much fun it would be to, like, take a road trip across the country, to see the ocean, travel. Go to California or England or Japan or whatever. You know, the stupid things people dream about when they’re stuck in a town like this.”
Sorrow had never known Patience wanted to travel. She had never known what Patience wanted at all beyond the small things that had defined their lives: warm weather and rich harvests, good days for their mother and smiles from their grandmother, the chance to go to town, the possibility of going to school. The girl Julie was describing might have been a stranger, and a stranger she would always remain. Even if every memory came back, Sorrow wouldn’t ever remember this Patience, sharing troubles and planning an escape and looking to the future. Sorrow had been eight years old, a tagalong little sister, and Patience had kept her dreams secret.
“I’m glad she had a friend,” Sorrow said weakly. She didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s not like we ever could have done any of it,” Julie said, but her voice was different now. Gone was the quiet warmth, the gentle sadness. She sounded, if anything, angry, and the change sent a chill through Sorrow. “Can you even imagine? Our moms would have flipped the fuck out. I don’t know what the hell happened between them way back when, but even when I was fifteen I wasn’t dumb enough to risk dredging that all up again.”
Sorrow’s stomach dropped. “What do you mean, what happened between them?”
“That’s what I don’t know,” Julie said. “Whatever it was, it was before I was born.”
“No, I mean—” Sorrow shook her head, trying to settle her buzzing thoughts. “Are you talking about something besides the usual family stuff?”
Julie tilted her head. “You know they used to be friends. Your mom and mine.”
“What?” A man working at the nearest table looked up with a scowl. Sorrow lowered her voice. “No, they didn’t. That’s not—”
Verity used to say, when she warned them away from the neighbors: friendship with the Abramses would only lead to heartache. More than trouble. More than police at the door, social workers in the kitchen, whispers around town. Heartache. It hadn’t meant anything to Sorrow as a child, that painfully intimate characterization of consequences. Their lives were a spiderweb of rules, guidelines they had cobbled together to avoid upsetting their mother, and Sorrow had never tried to tease out the reasons behind any particular tender spot. Don’t talk to the Abramses. Don’t make friends with the Abrams girls. Heartache.
“Are you sure?” Sorrow asked. “I mean, I’m not saying you’re . . . I have never heard that before in my life.”
“I don’t think most people know. I only found out because I found a picture of them together,” Julie said.
Sorrow stared. “No way.”
“Yeah. When I was a kid,” Julie said. “I was playing dress-up with my mom’s old things in the attic, and there were all these old boxes of pictures from my dad’s uncle. And there was your mom and mine. Like, forever ago. Back in the eighties or nineties.”
Sorrow’s head was spinning. Julie wasn’t lying; she didn’t have any reason to lie. Sorrow took a sip of tea, took a breath, but she couldn’t seem to get enough air. Her voice was high and strained. “Did you ask her about it?”
Julie rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, but she yelled at me and told me it was none of my business. So I asked Aunt Jody—Ethan’s mom—since she’s kind of an outsider and not stuck in the middle of the whole family thing, but I guess it was before she met Uncle Dean. She didn’t know anything about it.”
“Did you—did Patience know?” Sorrow asked.
“I don’t think so,” Julie said. She snapped her laptop closed and wound the cable around her headphones. “It was ancient history even then. We only ever talked about getting away from our families. Look, I’ve got to get going.”
It stung, to hear again how much Patience had been looking outward, and how little Sorrow had noticed, but she couldn’t think about that now, and she couldn’t be distracted by Verity and Hannah. Julie was packing up her stuff to leave, and Sorrow hadn’t asked her what she had come to ask.
“Can I ask you something else?” she said.
Julie hauled her bag onto her lap to slide the computer in. “What is it?”
“I, uh, talked to Cassie the other day.”
Julie looked up. “You did? Why? What did she say?”
It was much more of a reaction than Sorrow had been expecting: Julie spat the words so sharp and fast Sorrow leaned back, startled by her vehemence.
“She, uh, she said . . .” Sorrow couldn’t remember how she had decided to ask. Everything she had practiced had vanished into a blank space in her mind. “She said it was Patience.”
“What was?”
“The fires,” Sorrow said. “She said Patience started the fires.”
Julie stared, unblinking, for a long moment. “She didn’t say that.”
“Yes, she—”
“She wouldn’t say that.” Julie was a flurry of noise and motion, shoving her headphones into her bag, winding up her computer’s power cable. “You must have misunderstood her.”
“I didn’t misunderstand. I didn’t—”
“Why were you even talking to her about that? Why would you even ask?”
“I didn’t ask!” Sorrow said, her voice rising with frustration. “I didn’t bring it up! She did. She said—”
“Is that the whole reason you came to find me?” Julie asked. She stood up so quickly she jarred the table, and Sorrow’s iced tea sloshed from her cup. “Pretending to bond just so you could ask that?”
Sorrow’s face burned with shame. She couldn’t meet Julie’s eyes, but she had to ask. She had to say the words before Julie stormed away.
“Is it true?” she asked. “Is that what people think?”
“No,” Julie said. “Nobody thinks that. Cassie doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“Then why would she say it?”
The café door opened and a group of men in cycling clothes came in, and the small space was filled with the sound of their voices, laughter, their bike shoes clicking noisily over the floor. Sorrow turned to watch them, then looked up at Julie.
“What happened to Patience . . .” Julie sighed, and it was as though all the anger drained out of her. “It was an accident. A sad, awful accident. Why do you want to bring it all up now? It’s only going to hurt people.”
Tears of embarrassment stung Sorrow’s eyes.
“You should focus on remembering her when she was alive. Remember the good things.”