Tim Dackard stood before her, his eyes red-rimmed, his lips cracked. It appeared as though he had been up all night, if not for days. “I wish I could say you were a hard person to find.” His eyes were eager, wanting Mary to ask how, how he knew where she was. When she didn’t, he offered it. “My dad hired a detective after you left. To make sure you were really gone. I read his report.”
Mary leaned against the door frame, the pristine white tile aligned perfectly beneath her feet, her skin visible through the loose weave of the blanket. “What are you here for?”
Tim’s head fell back in a gaping but silent laugh, and Mary noticed the rash of pimples on his neck where his beard was coming in. When he looked at her again, she saw the delight he would take in this, in finally having power. “Are you serious?” he asked, with equal measures of hostility and amusement.
Mary waited for his answer, her face impassive.
With his arms crossed in front of him, Tim let out another scoffing laugh, then rolled his head to look around at the neighborhood. Squinting against the light, he let his eyes settle on the rustling leaves of one of the young oaks that stood in a neat curbside row. “It’s nice here,” he said, almost to himself. “Classy.” Then he turned back to Mary. “So where’s your sister?”
A ferocity swelled inside Mary like a rush of blood to the head, but she answered Tim plainly. “Sleeping,” she said.
“And your boyfriend?”
Mary didn’t feign shock. Since he was here, of course he would know about Stefan. “He’s sleeping, too.”
“Well, this will be cozy,” he said, as he went to step over the threshold.
Mary moved her body in front of his. “You can’t come in,” she said.
“I can, Mary,” he said quietly, all his wild, pulsing teenage anger radiating from him like something nuclear. Then from his back pocket he pulled out a Polaroid. She recognized it at once. Her face looking foreign and grotesque with feigned pleasure as Ron Dackard nuzzled her neck. “I absolutely can.”
“Stefan knows I’ve seen other men, Tim,” she said, her voice emotionless.
Tim’s eyes narrowed and she could see the eagerness of his lips, the wet anticipation of his threat. “Does he know you blackmailed them?” he asked. “Something tells me a family like the Kellys would frown on that sort of thing.”
Mary shrugged, as if brushing away a mild concern. “It wouldn’t matter,” she said. “You wouldn’t be able to prove anything.”
Tim leaned close until his lips were almost at hers. She could feel his stale breath, the warmth of it, when he said, “I wouldn’t have to.” Then he pushed past her and stepped into the foyer, looking around as he took it all in, as his eyes swept from ceiling to floor. “Nice carpet,” he said, letting out a single quiet laugh as he looked at the living room beyond.
It was true, of course—any proximity to such scandal would be enough to sully her in the eyes of the Kellys. Mary felt her heart begin to pulse. “What do you want?”
Tim smiled. “Not much, really,” he said. “A place to stay, to start.” Then he turned toward the hallway and began walking down it, tracing his fingertips down the white wall. “My parents kicked me out,” he explained, as Mary followed him. “Old Ron got tired of having me around.”
“Do you have any money?” asked Mary, as they stepped into the kitchen.
“I did,” he said, stiffening as he turned to face her. She noticed the red thread-thin lines of blood vessels rimming his nostrils. “But I ran out.”
“Do your parents know you came here?”
Tim let out an angry laugh. “No,” he said, crossing his arms in front of him and leaning against the counter. “Not yet.”
From the stairs, Mary heard footsteps, the halting sort that marked Hannah’s one-by-one descent down the stairs.
“You can’t stay here, Tim.”
Tim’s eyebrows drew together in feigned hurt. “That’s not very cousinly.”
Hannah was in the hallway now, and Mary felt the beat of her heart begin to build, but her voice was a flat line. “You need to leave,” she said.
Tim shook his head, crossed one ankle over the over, and wriggled his haunches against the counter, settling in. Behind him, light poured in through the window that looked out to the other units and their identical rear decks. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, relishing the taste of the words in his mouth, letting them linger. And she imagined waking Stefan up, begging him to come with her and Hannah, begging him to leave. She imagined the three of them just driving, driving, driving. Because Mary knew that she and Tim were the same sort of creature. That she could see through to his bones, and he to hers. That she knew what Tim was capable of because she was capable of it, too.
From behind her, she heard Hannah’s voice. “Mary?”
She let her eyes remain on Tim for a single exhalation that came up through her throat like a silent roar. Then she turned. Hannah stood at the threshold of the kitchen, her curls matted on one side with sleep. “Come here, Bunny,” Mary said, the blanket falling from her extended arm like it was a wing.
Hannah just looked at Mary.
“Oh, that’s what you call her,” Tim said, nodding with recognition. “I couldn’t remember.”
At the sound of Tim’s voice, Hannah shuffled to Mary, resting her cheek against her belly as she took in Tim. “You said he was no one,” she whispered, looking up at her sister.
And Mary felt Hannah’s words sink down to her stomach like an anchor drifting down through a dark sea. “I was wrong,” she said.
“I’m your cousin,” said Tim, cocking his head to see around Mary. “Remember?”
Mary and Hannah both looked at him until Mary pulled Hannah’s attention back in. “Did you sleep okay?” she asked, lifting Hannah’s chin so that all each of them could see was the other’s face. So that everything else was in the periphery. So that it always would be.
Hannah nodded. “Stefan’s still sleeping.”
Mary looked at Hannah and managed to smile. “Let’s let him,” she said. And she felt relief begin to rise inside her like a tide.