Chapter 19

A man approached me,” I told my mother. That was my excuse for coming. “At the grocery store near the hospital.”

She chewed on that for a second or two, her eyes hard. “Describe him.”

I did.

“Sounds like one of Tobias Hawthorne’s men. The fix is in, but they’re not letting up. What did the bastard want with you?”

That was a good question. Do they know—or even suspect—that something is off? At some point, would investigators realize they were one body short on Hawthorne Island?

“I don’t know,” I told my mother. “I didn’t stick around to find out.” I threw out a question before she could ask me another one. “What are they still doing here?”

My mother had ways of reminding people that she didn’t exist to answer their questions. She grabbed my chin, lifting my face toward hers, even though I was already meeting her eyes.

“What are you doing here, Hannah?” she asked.

Say something true, and say it calmly. “Kaylie. Is her room still…” I let just a hint of weakness peek through—not enough for her to exploit, just enough for her to be certain that she was stronger. “Did you…”

“Go on up.” Whatever else my mother was and wasn’t, there was very little senseless cruelty in her. Her cruelty always served a purpose, usually more than one. Her mercies did, too.

I knew that. I’d known that before coming here tonight, but there was no use in second-guessing myself now.

I walked up the stairs, my pace as measured as the breaths I took, and made it all the way to the end of the hall. I listened for footsteps, but no one was following me.

I let myself into Kaylie’s room, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Her closet door was still open. Her clothes were still on the hangers, except for the haphazard piles of items she’d worn or discarded on the floor.

I walked slowly forward, then sank down, touching the shirt my sister had been wearing the last time I’d seen her. Dance with me, you beautiful bitch. The leather wasn’t soft against my fingers, but the oversized sleepshirt I touched next was. I lifted it to my face, breathing in the smell of her. Citrus and rose. The scents didn’t go together, but Kaylie had never cared.

Her chaos had been a beautiful kind of chaos—and remarkably consistent. Her room looked like it had been tossed, but it had always looked like that, so I just had to hope that no one else had gotten there first.

That no one else in the family would dare to steal from Eden Rooney’s dead daughter.

It’s not stealing when you’re sisters, I could hear Kaylie saying. It’s borrowing with the intention not to return.

For once, I didn’t push away the memories. I couldn’t—not here. I could almost feel her with me as I went through the pockets of the clothes she’d left on the floor and found two pills. That was something—but not enough. I tried her closet next, then inside her pillowcase, then under her sheets and between the box spring and the mattress.

The expectation in the family business was that wares were not sampled without permission. Business was business. Pleasure was pleasure. But I knew my sister.

Eventually, I found a loose floorboard under the bed. Beneath it, there was a hollowed-out compartment. Inside, there was a plastic baggie. Dozens of small white pills stared back at me. Beneath the baggie, I found a wallet.

Her last night on earth, my sister had only stolen one.

I flipped it open, and Toby Hawthorne’s picture stared back at me from his driver’s license. I would have recognized that smirk anywhere, but his eyes looked different to me in the photo—the shape of them, opened wider than I’d ever seen them. He’s not drunk or high there.

He was smiling with his eyes, less come hither than shall I let you in on the grandest joke?

Suddenly, I heard footsteps coming down the hall.

I jammed the wallet and the bag of pills into the waistband of my scrubs, covering them with my shirt. Seven seconds later, when my father opened the door, I was crouched beside Kaylie’s clothes again, her sleepshirt clasped in my hands.

Citrus and rose.

My father—our father—stared at me from the doorway. “I know,” he said quietly.

He knew that I was mourning. He knew that I’d loved Kaylie with everything I had. You don’t know why I’m really here. You don’t know what I’ve done—what I just did.

“But, Hannah?”

I stood and met my father’s eyes.

“If you want out…” His voice went down an octave. “Don’t come back here again. I can only hold her off for so long.”