Now
Emma went to bed alone. Nathan never came back, but she woke to find a plate with plain toast beside the bed. The doctor had suggested she try to eat something the moment she woke up, before even sitting up, to combat the nausea. Its presence seemed like a good omen, at least. She nibbled on the edge, nose twitching at the scent of coffee downstairs. Nathan didn’t want her drinking coffee. The morning after she’d told him about the baby, he’d taken her mug out of her hand and dumped it down the drain. He’d memorized the lists of forbidden substances and was meticulous in checking that she wasn’t eating soft cheeses or glancing too intently at deli meats. The bottle of white wine she’d bought for toasting was in the kitchen trash, unopened.
She’d at least convinced him a cup or two of coffee a day was fine, but that didn’t stop the dark looks. If he’d made her some, maybe he was trying to apologize for last night.
Her stomach settled for now, she showered and dressed. In the bathroom, she looked through drawers still filled with her mother’s makeup—a dozen nearly identical shades of subdued lipstick, foundation, blush, nothing that might be construed as gaudy or showy or, God forbid, fun.
There must have been good things about Irene Palmer. People had loved her, after all. But when Emma thought back all she could remember was her anger, and the feeling of being trapped. Juliette had been everything their parents wanted; Daphne had survived by smothering the parts of her that weren’t, growing small enough that she didn’t stray outside the lines. Emma couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. She didn’t know which it was, only that every time her mother told her to sit still she wanted to run, every time she said to sing, Emma clamped her mouth shut.
Now she was going to be a mother. Theoretically. The chance of miscarriage still loomed. She wasn’t out of the first trimester yet, and her brief foray into reading online pregnancy forums had been a deluge of horror stories and tragedy. She’d been pregnant once before, after a broken condom incident with a guy she’d been seeing for a couple of months. She hadn’t even had the chance to make the appointment when she started bleeding. A pregnancy wasn’t a promise.
But she wanted this child. She wanted to be a mother—a better mother than hers had ever been.
Instead, her child was going to be born to a mother whose life was clouded in suspicion and lies.
She opened the bottom drawer. It was mostly filled with ancient cotton balls and Q-tips, but at the back was a small opaque plastic container, which she opened in idle curiosity. More lipstick—a single tube, this one a bright red. A birth control container, three of the pills gone. A small plastic bag with six round white pills in the bottom, which Emma vaguely recognized as the ones her mother had taken for her migraines. The last object in the container was a jewelry case, which Emma popped open to discover a thin silver bracelet, set with three petite diamonds. The inside of the bracelet was etched with a minute inscription. Forever yours.
The inscription was probably chosen by Dad’s secretary, though the birth control pills at least suggested there was some level of intimacy left in the relationship when they’d died. Oddly unsettled by the glimpse into her mother’s private life, Emma put everything back where she’d found it and shut the drawer.
She went downstairs, braced to see Nathan, but there was only a note on the counter. He’d gone into town for more groceries.
Or maybe just to get away from her.
Emma pulled her laptop out of her bag and set it up on the kitchen table. They didn’t have Wi-Fi at the house yet, but she set her phone to be a mobile hotspot and opened up a browser.
She had studiously avoided searching for herself over the years. It was not a famous crime, mostly by sheer luck—there had been a school shooting the week before, and the week after had seen a celebrity suicide, a deadly flood, and the arrest of a serial killer, all of which kept a comparatively everyday double murder out of the national headlines.
There were two Emma Palmers much more famous than she was, one a D-list reality star turned influencer, and one the author of extremely popular and extremely explicit werewolf romances. It made it easier to skate under the radar. But the articles were there. Easy enough to find.
Sitting at the kitchen table, just out of sight from the patch of hallway where her mother had bled out from a hole in her heart, she read them.
She had been braced for what she might read, but it still hit her like a physical blow, seeing the words in print. Shot to death in their house—daughters sleeping only yards away—no suspects at this time—second daughter’s relationship with an unidentified man—rumors of occult activity among youth …
The last was tucked in with almost a note of embarrassment.
Randolph and Irene Palmer were home at their house in Arden Hills when an unknown intruder entered the house. The intruder appears to have entered Mr. Palmer’s study. He was shot in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Mrs. Palmer’s body was found in the hallway, as if she had come toward the sound. She was shot in the chest at extremely close range. Blood was tracked between the bodies, leaving boot prints identified as a men’s size 10.5 Dr. Martens boot. The tracks exited from the back door of the house.
The gun was never recovered.
Emma took in a shaky breath. They’d been dead when she got there. Had been dead for a while, judging by the consistency of the blood. She’d panicked, looking for her sisters, convinced she would find their bodies next. And when she saw the blood on Daphne’s nightshirt, she’d thought for a moment her fear had manifested.
“No one can know,” Daphne had said.
She’d hushed her sister. Told her to stop talking. She was afraid that she knew what had happened—exactly what had happened. But that was before Juliette came stumbling into the house, wearing someone else’s clothes, her hair wet. And long before she learned that the gun hadn’t been one of Dad’s. Those had all been matched to their registration, confirming that they were all in the gun case where they belonged, securely locked away. He had always been meticulous about that. He kept the keys on him, wouldn’t let any of them touch the guns unless he was there. Not even their mother was allowed to lay a finger on them.
It had struck her as absurd, back then. He’d been so damn proud of those guns. Twenty-three of them. She’d counted once. Twenty-three guns and he’d never had the chance to even pick one up to defend himself.
She wondered where they were now. Not that she wanted them around. She knew how to shoot—you couldn’t have Randolph Palmer for a father and not be intimately familiar with how to handle a gun—but she’d never enjoyed it the way Juliette had. Though even with shooting there was a delicacy to the way Juliette operated—the careful way she picked out her target, plucked out a shot. No wasted movement or bravado, an almost ladylike lethality. Daphne didn’t seem to enjoy the exercise, but she was competent—lining things up, tucking her tongue at the corner of her mouth, and squeezing off a shot without flinching.
She navigated back to the article. The boot prints. Gabriel wore size 10.5 shoes. But the article said they weren’t just any shoes—Doc Martens. Did Gabriel own a pair of Docs? She tried to remember, but all she could picture him in were sneakers. Not that she’d known him that well. She’d met him only a few months before her parents died.
It had felt like a lifetime. The moment they met, there had been a connection between them that she couldn’t explain. Like he understood her, in a way no one else did. Sometimes she thought he must be humoring her, pretending to care about what she had to say, but if that was the case, he never slipped up. He took her seriously. He liked her.
For Emma at sixteen, that had been a miracle. She would have done anything for Gabriel. She would never have hurt him. Not intentionally. By the time she realized the position she’d put him in, it was too late. She couldn’t admit her lie. Not without looking guilty.
Or revealing the truth.
She chewed her lip. Part of her wanted to close the article, pretend that she’d never read it, and go back to living as if only the present mattered. But it was too late for that. She needed to know—know more, at least, than she did now.
She grabbed her phone from the counter where it had been charging and sent a quick text to Christopher Best.
Are you free to talk? I have some questions about back then.
She assumed she didn’t have to tell him what she meant.
The sound of car tires on the gravel outside drew her attention. She closed her laptop quickly, not quite sure why she had the instinct to hide what she was looking at from her husband.
A moment later the doorbell rang. Frowning, Emma made her way to the door, wondering if Nathan had forgotten his keys—but when she opened it, she found a stranger standing on the front steps. The woman had masses of dark, wavy hair that fell to her shoulders and tattoos of flowered vines wrapping up her arms, a snake twining among them on the left. She wore a loose, sleeveless black top with gaping armholes that showed off the turquoise bra underneath and a glimpse of pale ribs decorated with more inked-on flowers.
“Hey, Emma,” the woman said. Her voice was low and rough and entirely wrong, but suddenly the half-familiar features clicked into place.
“Juliette?” Emma asked, gaping at her older sister. “What are you doing here?”
Juliette raked her thick hair back from her face. It flopped forward again as soon as she released it. Her gaze was wary and almost arrogant. “Can I come in?”
“It’s your house, too,” Emma said flatly. She turned and walked back inside. There was a moment of silence, and then Juliette followed her, shoes squeaking on the hardwood. Their mother would have killed them for wearing shoes in the house, but Emma didn’t say anything as Juliette followed her back down the hall and through the great room, pausing momentarily to look at the piano before traipsing back into the kitchen.
“Coffee?” Emma asked.
“Sure,” Juliette said, hands in her back pockets.
Emma waved at the coffeepot. “Help yourself.”
Juliette’s mouth pursed, but she walked past Emma, getting a dust-rimed mug down from the cupboard where they’d always been. She poured herself the dregs of the morning coffee.
Juliette held the mug in both hands without drinking. Emma stood across the table from her, arms crossed. “So,” Juliette said. She raised an eyebrow. “This is awkward.”
“Really?” Emma said, scoffing. “It’s been a decade and a half, and you haven’t spoken a single word to me. Yeah, that’s awkward.”
“Do you want me to say I’m sorry?” Juliette asked, eyebrow still cocked.
Emma choked on a laugh. “Which sorry would that be, exactly? ‘Sorry I haven’t called you anytime in the last fourteen years, nothing personal’? ‘Sorry I never said a word to help when you were the top suspect in our parents’ murders’? ‘Sorry I left you in foster care, skipped your wedding, never so much as wrote you a birthday card’?”
Juliette had the decency to look away. “I was just a kid.”
“So was I. So was Daphne. We needed you,” Emma said, her voice raw. Pain she’d thought she’d left behind her long ago raked nails down her spine.
“I know. But I was a complete mess,” Juliette said. “I wouldn’t have been any good to you. I couldn’t look after myself, much less you.”
“That didn’t mean you had to disappear,” Emma said.
“Jesus, Emma. What was I supposed to do? Mom and Dad were dead, and you—” Juliette faltered.
Emma’s lip curled. “And I what?”
“You told us what to do. We hid things. We lied,” Juliette said in a whisper, as if there were anyone alive in this house to hear. “Then Gabriel Mahoney gets arrested and everyone’s saying you two killed them. What the fuck was I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know. What was I supposed to think when you came in the door wearing someone else’s clothes, when you were supposed to be asleep in bed?” Emma shot back. “I never told anyone. I didn’t say a goddamn word, but you were happy to sell me out.”
“All I told Hadley was that you were seeing Gabriel.”
“And that I wasn’t in the tree house. But you let him keep thinking you were,” Emma said.
“He knew we were lying. I was doing damage control,” Juliette protested. Emma stared at her. Juliette wasn’t like Nathan. She’d always been hard to read. She would arrange her features into demure smiles and simpering adoration for their parents, shoot poisonous glares at her sisters. And if you caught her when she thought no one was looking, she always had a peculiarly blank expression. Like she was waiting to be informed of what performance was required of her. Now her expression was wounded, defensive. But there might have been anything underneath.
“Juliette,” Emma began.
“JJ,” her sister said, with the tone of a correction. She set the mug on the counter beside her, the coffee untouched. “I go by JJ now.”
“Fine. JJ,” Emma amended, the name sounding false to her ears. “Did you come all this way to rehash the past?”
“No,” JJ said. “I came to find out what you’re planning to do with the house.”
She is lying, Emma thought. But what other reason could she have for coming? “There isn’t a plan,” Emma said. “We needed a place to stay for a while. I figured no one else was using it.”
“I don’t understand how you could live in this place,” JJ said, unconvinced.
“It’s just a house.”
“We should have sold it a long time ago. Or burned it down,” JJ said, looking along the ceiling, as if peering into the soul of the house itself.
Isn’t that what she’d wanted, too? Out of their hands or out of the world completely. But now, with JJ standing in this kitchen, Emma couldn’t help but look at her as an intruder—an intruder in Emma’s home.
“Is that what you want to do? Sell it?” Emma asked.
“It seems like the sensible thing, right? Then we can all pretend this place never existed,” JJ said.
“And we can do the same about each other,” Emma replied icily.
“That’s not what I said.”
“We need all three of us to sign off on selling the house,” Emma said, ignoring her. “If you can get Daphne on board, fine. We’ll talk about it.”
“What does she think about the whole thing?” JJ asked.
“How should I know?”
JJ’s brow furrowed. “You haven’t discussed it?”
Emma looked at her evenly. “I’ve spoken to Daphne once in the last fourteen years.”
“What?” JJ looked dumbfounded.
“You do know that she was in foster care,” Emma said.
“You both were,” JJ said. “You were together. It wasn’t like I could take care of you. I was a college student in the dorms—then getting kicked out of the dorms. I couldn’t…” Her teeth clicked shut.
“After I aged out, I got my own place and tried to get custody, but she didn’t want anything to do with me. Neither of you did,” Emma said. Her voice was steady but her hands clenched, holding tight against the surge of old anger, old grief.
“I didn’t realize.”
“Clearly.” It came out a snarl.
“Emma. When you came to my door that day I was a mess. I’d dropped out of school, I was drinking and taking a seriously dangerous amount of drugs and doing the kind of sleeping around that ends with being dismembered in a dumpster.”
“And now?” Emma asked. She had no idea what her sister did with herself.
“I got my life together eventually,” she said, hesitant.
“What do you do, then? Bartender? Musician?” Emma asked.
“I work at a bank, actually,” JJ said with a wry smile. “What about you? Did you end up going to art school like you planned?”
Emma’s mouth tightened in a flat line. “No. I didn’t go to art school.” JJ’s smile faltered. “You didn’t come here to catch up. Or to talk about selling the house. You could have done that over the phone. So why are you really here, Juliette?” Emma asked.
This time JJ didn’t correct her. “You being back here is going to make people start thinking about what happened. They’re going to start asking questions again,” she said. And there it was.
“And? Let them talk,” Emma said dismissively, though she tasted something sour in the back of her mouth.
“If the police ask you what happened, what are you going to tell them?” JJ asked, gaze fixed intently on Emma.
Behind the carefully constructed mask, behind the performance of sisterly concern, Emma saw it. A flicker of fear. “What are you worried I might say?” Emma asked.
The front door opened. JJ jumped, nearly knocking the coffee mug over as she straightened. Nathan’s familiar long stride approached, accompanied by his voice.
“Whose car is that in the drive?” he asked, and then stepped into view. JJ tucked her hands into her pockets, shoulders slightly hunched as he caught sight of her. “Oh. Hi.”
“Nathan, this is my sister Juliette,” Emma said neutrally.
Nathan processed this for a moment, eyebrows rising in surprise, then stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Juliette. I’m Nathan. Nathan Gates. I’ve heard all about you, of course.”
JJ took his hand and shook it slowly. “Really. How wonderful. And it’s JJ, actually. I haven’t gone by Juliette since I was a kid.”
“Right,” Nathan said with a sharp nod and a look at Emma like she should have told him. “What brings you by?”
“I just came to talk to Emma about getting the place fixed up to sell,” JJ said, her expression open and friendly.
“Excellent. That’s just what we’ve been talking about,” Nathan said. They hadn’t talked much at all, but he said it as if it were a done deal. “It definitely needs some work. But I was thinking, if you three are all on board with it, we could get a Realtor out. Come up with a plan. Right now, I’m focusing on getting things cleaned out and sorted, so we can decide what to do with it all.”
“Sounds great. You just let me know if you need help,” JJ said easily.
“Are you staying in town? Need your old room for a few days?” Nathan asked. Emma cut him a look, but his eyes hadn’t left JJ, and for the first time Emma realized just how attractive her older sister was, next to mousy Emma in her T-shirt and ponytail.
“You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to spend a night in this fucking place,” JJ said blithely. She looked past Nathan at Emma. “We’ll talk again soon.”
“That will be novel,” Emma said. JJ flinched, and Emma felt a faint flash of satisfaction.
JJ walked out without another word. Emma went to the counter and dumped out the coffee, watching it swirl down the drain. She didn’t know what she’d expected to feel if she ever saw her sisters again. Had she really hoped for an apology? She wasn’t sure there was an apology Juliette could offer that would mean anything.
What was Juliette doing here? Not checking out the house. Checking out Emma, maybe. Something about Emma coming back to the house had worried her. Spooked her, even.
Like maybe she was afraid that Emma was going to spill their secrets, and that Juliette was the one who would pay the price.
“Ah, shit,” Nathan said suddenly. Emma gave him an empty look, uncomprehending. He snapped his fingers. “We should have asked her about the carriage house keys. Think you could give her a call?”
“No,” Emma snapped.
“Whoa. What did I do?” Nathan asked, hands immediately up in surrender. The cold remove that had carried Emma through the conversation with JJ shattered.
“I’m sorry. It’s just—seeing her again…” Emma covered her face with her hands, fighting the edge of a sob.
“Hey.” Nathan stepped over to her, gathered her against his chest. “I’m sorry. You know how bad I am at subtext.”
“That’s an understatement.” Her words were edged with the tears that always seemed to be on the surface these days. She wasn’t sure how much of it she could blame on the hormones. “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to feel about her. She left us, Nathan.”
“Is there any point bringing that up now, though?” Nathan asked. He sounded almost annoyed. “We’re going to have to work with your sisters to deal with the house. You keeping grudges isn’t going to help with that.”
She pulled away from him, wiping her eyes. “You’re probably right.”
“I get that you’re emotional,” he said. “But you have to let go of the past to move into the future, right?”
“Did you see that in a TED Talk or something?” Emma asked, struggling to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
He made an irritated noise. “Look. With everything you’ve gone through, maybe it’s not surprising that you’re not acting rational. Which is—it’s fine. I can handle things.”
He had always been the steady one, the optimistic one. The sane one. She had always gone along with what Nathan deemed to be the best. He was the one with the healthy relationship with his parents, the one who had managed to finish high school, get a degree, keep friends for more than six months at a time. Now she felt like she was falling apart more than ever, and maybe he was right. Maybe she wasn’t being rational.
“There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about that’s kind of related,” he went on. He put a hand against the counter, the other braced against his hip. His gaze was searching. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go into town. I can run all the errands and things. You should stay at the house.”
“Why?” Emma asked, instantly bristling. “There’s tons to do. It doesn’t make sense for one of us to be stuck here.”
“I don’t like the idea of people gossiping because they saw you out buying milk, or whatever. Getting home and calling their girlfriends to go ‘Oh, remember that psycho teen Emma Palmer, I saw her in the Stop & Shop.’” He put on a mocking little falsetto.
“People aren’t going to stop talking just because I don’t leave the house,” Emma countered. He sounded like her mother, always worried about what everyone else thought. “You aren’t going to leave the house looking like that, are you?”
He threw a hand in the air. “Emma, I am living here. I am in this house, in this town, I am here even after you lied to me about all of this. Can you not do this one thing for me? For fuck’s sake. After everything you’ve put me through the last few weeks—”
“Everything I’ve put you through?” Emma asked. “I’m not the only one who screwed up, Nathan. And I’m not going to be a prisoner in this house because you’re worried about gossip.” The heat in her voice surprised her.
He looked at her with a baffled expression. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” he said. “You’re not acting like yourself. Last night, and now this.”
No, she wasn’t acting like herself—not the Emma that he knew, at least. Not the Emma she had created painstakingly, a rebuke to the girl she had been. But now she was home, and that old Emma had been waiting for her here the whole time. A ghost in this house.
Nathan didn’t know that Emma. The one who always chose to fight instead of surrender, the one who was contrary and clever and sometimes cruel. He knew the soft Emma, the quiet Emma, the version who would bend and bend and bend and never break.
“Emma. I love you. I only want to do what’s best for you. For us.” He reached out, a sudden movement that made her flinch, and pulled her in toward him again. She surrendered and murmured a wordless agreement.
He said he wanted what was best for them. But this time, he was wrong. She couldn’t keep hiding from what had happened. She had to know. For herself. For her child. For any hope of a future.
“I’ll stay in. I won’t leave,” she said, lying as she had so many times before.