It wasn’t anything Sorrow hadn’t thought to herself before, but hearing it spoken aloud in Cassie’s bitter voice made the weight of those secrets press anew on her shoulders and spine. What would it have mattered, if their parents had discovered Patience and Julie were friends? Centuries of animosity and feuding, of fighting with words and violence, of glaring and scheming across a wire fence that bound their families together more than it separated them, and what were they left with? Two dead girls and eight years of secrets. A girl in a graveyard with a gun.
“I thought . . .” Cassie sniffled. “I thought maybe Julie and Patience were the ones who had—I thought they’d been in my playhouse. Maybe they’d been smoking or something. Left a candle burning. Whatever my parents thought I’d been doing. I don’t even know why. I just thought, it wasn’t fair, everything was all about Julie, and that one thing that was supposed to be mine, I didn’t even have that anymore. So I followed her that night when she went out to meet your sister. They had this—secret meeting code, I don’t know, it was stupid. I guess they had to make something up because you guys never had phones. Your sister would shine her flashlight from the meadow so Julie would know she was there.”
You know how to find me, Julie had said, that day in the orchard. It had meant more to Patience than it had to Sorrow. An invitation to reconcile. Sorrow felt the nip of a mosquito on her arm, brushed it away. Somewhere in the darkness an owl hooted. Grass rustled as a field mouse scurried for its burrow.
“I didn’t mean to hurt them,” Cassie said. Every word sounded as though it were being torn from her throat. “I didn’t mean that. I just thought—I wanted to scare them. I wanted to make Julie mad. Everybody was looking at her all the time and I just wanted, I just wanted—to ruin her secret place like, like I thought she’d ruined mine. I never meant to hurt them.”
She dropped the gun and crumpled in on herself, covering her face with both hands. Her shoulders shook as the pained sobs escaped through her fingers.
Sorrow pressed her fingers into the ground, curling her fingers into the soil again, holding herself still. She wanted to grab Cassie and shake her and demand a better explanation. She wanted to jump to her feet and run, run, run, flee into the orchard and the darkness until her breath was a rasp and the sound of Cassie’s agonized sobs was swallowed by the song of crickets and the stir of breeze-turned leaves. She wanted to grab Cassie’s hair and pull her head back to see her face, to look at her, eye to eye, and command her to say it again.
There was distant thunder at the back of her mind, like a storm crawling over the ocean. She had wanted to know. She had come back to Vermont for this very moment. She had risked breaking her family apart. She had hurt her mother and grandmother. She had scraped carelessly through the scattered debris of her own memories to find this one truth, and now all she wanted was to scream and kick and wail and make Cassie take it back. She wanted to have never heard it. She wanted the soil beneath her, the trees around her, the whole of the embracing orchard to leach away that terrible knowledge, to draw it out through her grasping fingertips to take it away as it had done before, to spread the awful bleak ache she felt in her chest over acres and hollows, hills and fields, spread it as thin and fragile as the last feeble frost before winter’s end.
“Why . . .” Sorrow had to stop, steady herself, swallow the bile at the back of her throat. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
Cassie rubbed her hands over her face. “What?”
“If you didn’t mean—why didn’t you run for help?”
“I—but I did. We did. Julie came running out first, and Patience was right behind her but she—she tripped and she fell, we heard her fall. She screamed. That hole in the floor.” Cassie’s breath was short, shuddering. “Julie tried, she tried to get back inside—it was so fast. The roof came down so fast, but she still tried to go back in. It was so hot and so loud and—and she was shouting and screaming and—I ran up to the house. I got our parents.”
The hair on Sorrow’s neck prickled. “You told your parents?”
“I woke them up,” Cassie said. “I was screaming my head off.”
“Your parents know,” Sorrow said.
“They’ve always known.”
They had always known.
Eight years ago Paul and Hannah Abrams had not once challenged the police theory that a homeless drifter had been responsible for both fires. They had never pointed a finger, not at the Lovegoods or anybody else. The whole town had been in an uproar over Patience’s shocking death, but the Abramses had never demanded a more thorough investigation into the fire on their own land. A few weeks later they had taken their daughters out of town and let the matter wither away unsolved. If the police had asked Sorrow about the barn, she would have cracked like an eggshell, and the rest of the story might have come out. She had been a child, scared and guilty and angry all at the same time. She would have confessed in a heartbeat, if anybody had asked. They could have put it together. Nobody ever did.
“They said we couldn’t tell,” Cassie said. “They made us promise we would never tell. Over and over again. We kept having to say it. It was a stranger. It was a homeless person. That’s all we know. We had to—” Cassie’s voice broke, small and wretched. “We had to promise.”
Sorrow felt something splinter inside of her, with a pain like a mountain cleaving open. She wiped tears from her face, but more were falling. The darkening orchard was a blur around them.
“You were a little kid,” she said. “You wouldn’t have been—you said it was an accident. They shouldn’t have made you do that.”
Cassie was a shuddering shape in the night, pale shirt and pale hair, hunched over herself. Her breath hitched with painful cries, and a couple of times she made a terrible keening noise, so soft it was barely audible.
She inhaled tightly, let out her breath through her fingers. She said, “Julie left a note. My mom found it before the police looked.”
Sorrow was afraid to ask. “You read it?”
“She said she was . . . she was sorry but she was so tired. She didn’t want to keep lying. But she didn’t even say it was me. I think she wanted people to think it was her. I think she knew that I was trying to . . . I don’t know. That shit I said to you, about your sister, it was bullshit. I just wanted people to notice. She knew that. Julie always understood. But she never did anything wrong. It was never her fault. I don’t want anybody to think it was her fault.”
A breathless pause, the orchard around them quietly waiting.
Sorrow said, “We can tell them.”
Cassie sniffed roughly and lifted her head. “What?”
“We can tell the truth,” Sorrow said. There was an ache at the back of her throat. She felt like she had been screaming. “Both of us.”