Now
Emma knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Long after Nathan went up to bed, she remained downstairs, stalking from room to room. She furiously dusted a bookshelf, threw open a closet to shove old coat hangers and ancient wrapping paper into a trash bag, abandoned it to scrub the grime from the powder room faucet. She lurched from room to room and task to task, completing nothing.
And every time she walked through the foyer and the dining room, the words on the wall taunted her.
MURDERER
KILLER
PSYCHO
She’d heard them all. Whispered behind her, spoken boldly to her face. She’d left Arden Hills, but the rumors had followed her to her new high school. The principal and teachers had made noise about making sure the school was a safe place for her, but in their eyes, she’d seen the same questions.
She’d dropped out. Christopher Best had tried to talk her out of it, and her next foster family had reenrolled her in school, but with less than a year until she aged out, it wasn’t like anyone was really paying attention when she just didn’t go. It wasn’t until she was on her own that she got her GED, got herself into community college—far away from Arden Hills.
MURDERER. KILLER. PSYCHO.
She found the bags from the hardware store. She pulled on a mask and rubber gloves, and she got to work. The fumes made her eyes water as she scrubbed at the words, watching them surrender to the chemical assault. She started to feel woozy, realized she hadn’t thought to open a window. She yanked it open. The air was as swampy outside as it was inside.
She had outrun this. For a little while. All it had taken was lying to everyone she met. Lying to her husband.
She stripped off the mask. The chemical tang was heavy in the air. She threw the gloves and mask onto the end table nearby. The words were almost gone, but the trace of them remained. You could still read them, if you knew what they said.
She shouldn’t be doing this. It couldn’t be good for the baby. She needed to think of more than just herself. She needed to eat well and sleep and avoid stress, as the doctor had so helpfully suggested, like that was possible.
Emma’s phone rang, startling her. She pulled it out of her pocket. Gabriel’s name glowed on the screen. She hurried to answer, adrenaline coursing through her.
“Hello? Gabriel?” she said, pressing the phone to her ear. What time was it?
“Emma.” A sigh, a silence. “Look. I’m sorry to call so late, but I wanted to tell you … I wasn’t expecting to see you. I thought I could leave the keys and go.”
“It’s okay,” Emma said at once. “I understand. The way we left things…”
“The way you left things, you mean,” Gabriel said. “You took off. You didn’t say a goddamn word.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me.”
“You were right. That doesn’t mean you didn’t owe me an explanation.”
“I never wanted any of it to happen,” Emma told him. “I’m sorry. Sorrier than you can know. I didn’t realize that Ellis was going to try to put it on you. I didn’t know he even knew who you were.”
“You lied, Emma,” Gabriel said. She shut her eyes. “You told him you were with your sisters that night. And I know you weren’t, because you were with me. You gave yourself an alibi and left me without one.”
“You would have been in trouble if Ellis thought I was with you, too,” Emma said. “You know how many times I told him you weren’t my boyfriend and he didn’t believe me? If he knew I was at your house—in your bed that night—”
“You know, if I’ve got to be falsely accused of something I’d rather it be sleeping with you than double murder, actually,” Gabriel said bitterly.
“Gabriel…”
“What?” he asked, voice rough.
Emma looked at the words written on the wall. It didn’t matter how thoroughly she scrubbed, painted, covered them up. They’d always be there. “I was with you that night. But not the whole night. You left.”
“Yeah. I did,” Gabriel said. “But, Emma? So did you.”
Her breath hitched. He knew. He’d figured it out.
The silence stretched. Then Gabriel’s voice came again, steady and calm. “Listen, Emma. I’ve helped out with the house. I didn’t mind doing that. And I can’t stop you from coming back, obviously. But I don’t need you in my life. You only ever fucked things up for me.”
“I never meant for you to get hurt,” she managed. “I only wanted…”
“You wanted to use me against your parents. And they’re gone, so you’ve got no more reason to keep me around, right? Goodbye, Emma. Don’t contact me again.”
The line went dead. She set her phone on the table and staggered to where she had abandoned her gloves and mask. She pulled them back on. Turned back to the wall. And started again.
Emma dragged herself up the stairs. Her hands felt raw. So did her throat. Her joints and her feet ached. The words were all but gone—would never be gone. The things Gabriel had said, his scarred-over anger, echoed in her ears.
Nathan lay sleeping, sprawled across the top of the covers, stripped down to his briefs. The house didn’t have air-conditioning, and the upstairs was stifling. Emma peeled off her T-shirt and pants and lay on the bed next to him. A finger trailing across his chest woke him; fingertips against his lips stifled his mumbled question.
“You have to believe me,” she whispered, pleading.
“I do. Of course I do,” he said, pulling her close. He kissed her brow; she kissed his throat. Then he was awake, rolling to half pin her against the bed, his hands and lips on her skin. They moved with more desperation than desire, as if this could be the proof they needed, the proof they wished they could give.
With Nathan’s cheek pressed against her stomach, her fingers playing in his hair, Emma said, “How can you be sure?”
“Sure of what?” he asked, voice muddy with sleep and the slow fade of pleasure.
“How can you be sure I didn’t do it?” Emma asked.
Nathan lifted his head. His hand rested on her thigh, possessive. “You say you didn’t. I believe you.”
She shook her head. It wasn’t enough. “You don’t know,” she said. “Even if you think I didn’t do it, you don’t know who did. So you’ll wonder. And that means you’ll wonder about me.”
“I won’t,” he promised. He was such a bad liar.
“She’ll wonder,” she said. Her hand slid over her lower abdomen. “Someone will tell her or she’ll go looking, and then she’ll wonder, and I can’t—I can’t—”
Nathan curled his hand around hers, ran a thumb over her knuckles. “We’ve got a long time to figure it out.” He paused. “She?”
“Just trying it out,” Emma said. It and the baby didn’t feel real. She needed it to feel real. She needed there to be a reason.
“A girl would be nice. I’d like that,” Nathan said, and pressed a tender kiss against her stomach. She shivered. “Then a boy. One of each.”
“My dad wanted a boy,” Emma said. She hadn’t remembered that in years. “He was so happy with Juliette, but that was before he started to think he wouldn’t get a son. I was a disappointment. Daphne was a disaster. They kept trying after that. Mom got pregnant again when I was seven. She lost it when she was five months along. It was a boy. Mom wanted to name him Randolph Junior, but Dad said he wanted his living son to have his name. She named him Anthony instead.”
Her mother had called them into the hospital room to meet him. Emma had expected him to look like her baby dolls, but he was rubbery and shrunken, swaddled in blankets that didn’t look soft enough for his delicate skin. Her mother wanted them to kiss his forehead, touch his hand, hold him. Emma wanted to run away. She loved her brother but she couldn’t see how this could be him. She darted out the door. Outside, her father caught her by the arm and slapped her in the face. He’d forced her to go back in.
He never went into the room himself.
She found herself telling Nathan this, something she hadn’t thought or spoken of in many years, but now it seemed like the most important thing, the only thing. The words dried up on her lips, and she looked at him and instantly thought she had made a mistake. A look of revulsion pinched his features. He already knew she was damaged. She shouldn’t have put this on him, too.
“That’s awful,” Nathan said, after too long. “Grief … it does strange things to people.”
“It wasn’t out of character for him,” Emma said flatly. “Nathan. There’s a reason people thought I might have killed my parents. I hated them.”
“Everyone hates their parents,” Nathan said.
Where had she heard that before? “I wanted to kill them. I thought about it so many times.”
Nathan was quiet, his thumb playing back and forth over her thigh. She could tell he wanted to be anywhere but here.
“But the thing is,” Emma said. She fell silent. Then pressed on. “The thing is, I never once thought about how I would get away with it. I never thought about hiding it.”
“Maybe that means you didn’t really want to do it,” Nathan said. “You were just angry.”
She made a noise that was almost agreement, but she didn’t think that was quite right. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to kill her parents. It was that she knew if she did, there would be no point trying to save herself.
That was why she had hated shooting so much, every time her father made her go out. Because every time she pulled the trigger, she felt like she wasn’t just destroying something else. She was destroying herself, too.
She remembered the kick of the gun. Yelping. Her father’s laugh. “That’s just the recoil. It’s not gonna kill you.”
She’d known that if she killed them, there was no point trying to get away with it. There was no getting away. Not then.
And not now.
Something thumped downstairs. Emma jolted upright.
“What was…?” Nathan began, and then Emma’s nose, so sensitive since her little houseguest moved in, caught an alarming scent.
“Smoke,” she said, leaping from the bed. She bolted out of the door and down the stairs, the sweat cool on her bare skin. She saw at once the warm, wavering light splashed against the foyer wall—the fire was in the dining room. The dining room, where the wall was covered in paint thinner.
She darted left instead of right, toward the library. The armchair there had been covered in a heavy drop cloth instead of plastic, and it was still folded near the wall. She’d grabbed it and was running back by the time Nathan came down the stairs—he’d taken the time to pull on his briefs.
“What—” he started, but she just grunted.
The fire was contained to the floor in front of the window—the window she’d left open. There was something in the middle of it, a lump, she couldn’t tell what. The rug had caught at the edges, the fire creeping toward the curtains, toward the far wall, and the air was still thick with fumes. She threw the drop cloth over the fire.
It was out in a moment. Suffocated beneath the thick fabric, the smell of smoke joining the rank burn of chemicals.
Movement outside caught Emma’s eye, and she whipped her head toward the window in time to see a figure leaping over the wall at the front of the property. She stepped toward the window to get a better look, but Nathan caught her arm.
“You’re not wearing any clothes,” he said, and she gave him a disbelieving look. She yanked her arm away, stalked to the window. The figure was gone. Had there just been one of them?
Nathan pulled up the side of the canvas, made a face. “I think that’s flaming dog shit. I didn’t think people actually did that,” he said.
The fading adrenaline sent a shiver through her, and suddenly Emma was very aware that she was standing in front of the window completely naked. She wrapped her arms around her middle, fighting off a feeling of vulnerability. Exposure.
Idiot kids, she thought. That’s all it was.
“I’m going to put some clothes on,” she said, voice shaky with anger and fear, and marched out of the room.
They couldn’t stay here. This had been a mistake. They couldn’t have a baby here. But they couldn’t leave now. Not until—unless—Nathan found a new job. Or she did, something steady, but who was going to hire a woman who would be leaving in a few months for maternity leave? Maybe she could hide the pregnancy. And then what? She wouldn’t have been anywhere long enough to get paid leave, so they’d be back to where they started.
She pulled on a T-shirt and shorts and raked her hair into something she hoped made her look less manic. She wanted to collapse into bed, but she wasn’t going to leave that vile mess on the floor.
Halfway back down the stairs, she heard Nathan’s voice.
“—Thank you. No, we’re not going anywhere. Okay.” She stepped around the doorway to see him hanging up the phone.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“Calling the police,” Nathan said. He rubbed the side of his neck. “They said they’d send someone out soon.”
“Are you kidding me?” Emma asked. She wanted to strangle him. “Why would you do that?”
“Because someone tried to burn our house down?” Nathan asked impatiently.
She groaned, covering her face with her hands.
“We need to make a report,” he insisted. “I’ll talk to them. You don’t have to say anything. I’m going to go get some pants on, okay?”
She didn’t answer as he walked past her and up the stairs.
Just some stupid kids. Stupid kids who knew who she was and knew she was back, because why else would they have come? The house had been broken into before. It wasn’t safe.
It was never safe.
She let out a choked scream and slammed the side of her fist against the wall, hard enough to send pain shooting up the bones of her arm. Nathan’s footsteps paused in the hall upstairs. Then resumed.
Emma went out to the porch to wait, as she had when she was sixteen years old, for the police to arrive.