Time stops as Mom gasps. We become statues, frozen in this moment. Even Tate, who flinched at Andy’s name, has gone completely still. My pulse, once thrashing, is silent.
“No,” I mutter.
It’s a No of astonishment, of anguish. It’s a No of refusal. A No that means You’re wrong.
“You’re lying.”
“That would be nice,” Charlie scoffs. “But no. I’m not. Dad told me, ‘You’re old enough now that the women are more likely to feel threatened than protective. Andy’ll work better.’ ”
Something slinks into my stomach, cold but clawing. Its nails scrape against my insides, tentative for now, but still drawing blood.
“I would have known,” I say, “if my twin were a murderer.”
Tate inhales sharply. “Dahlia, no. They weren’t murderers. Not Charlie and Andy. They were victims of Dad. Same as those women.”
I turn my head to glare at her. “I hardly think those women would see it the same way.”
“We were bait,” Charlie says. “So, is— Is a worm what kills a fish, because it draws it to the hook? Or is it the hook that kills it? Or the man holding the rod?” He looks up at me, eyes desperate and wide. “Which is it? Because I really don’t know.”
“It’s the man!” Tate cries.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Andy didn’t do it. I would have known. I would have known.”
Mom places a shaky hand on my shoulder, but I shrug it off.
“I regret it,” Charlie says, “not protecting him from it. Not fighting Dad, telling him he couldn’t do to Andy what he did to me. But at the same time, I was so relieved that it wasn’t me anymore. That the secret wasn’t just his and mine anymore; someone else had to hold it, too.”
“Oh, Charlie,” Mom whimpers. “He was just a boy.”
“So was I,” he snaps.
Mom nods, chastised, taking a step back. I tighten my grip on the counter, ignoring the talons in my stomach, even as they dig in deeper.
“And I hated it,” Charlie continues. “I couldn’t stand knowing what Dad was doing to him. Why do you think I left, the second I got my inheritance? I couldn’t be in this house. And when Tate and I finally returned home, Andy was turning sixteen—two years older than I was when Dad said I wouldn’t work anymore. Jessie Stanton had just been killed, but I figured that would be the end of it. He would have told Andy, like he told me, that it was over for him now. And I wanted to see him. Andy. I wanted to know he was okay.
“But when we got here, I knew right away I was wrong. Nothing was over. I could feel it everywhere—the oppressive control Dad had over Andy. The control I’d barely escaped. And it just… it triggered all the—the terror, and rage, and self-hatred I’d always tried so hard to tamp down, until I was in my room, freaking out and… I couldn’t hide it anymore. I confessed it all to Tate.”
I blink at him, his last sentence slow to sink in. Then I turn toward Tate.
“You knew.”
Of course she did: You have to tell them, she said, when I confronted Charlie with the brand. And before that, she held his panicked gaze when the police were searching his room. They’re so intertwined, so fastened together within their cocoon, that there’s probably nothing they don’t know about each other.
But this— This is more than a secret shared between siblings; it’s a secret kept from everyone. From me.
“You’ve known,” I say, “for ten years, that Dad was the Blackburn Killer.” My voice quivers. “And you didn’t tell anyone? You never thought to call the police?”
Tate goes to Charlie now, sinking down beside him. As she wraps him in her arms, they lean toward each other, the sides of their foreheads touching. Tate studies the floor as she speaks.
“I wanted to tell someone.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“We didn’t think Dad would kill again. He’d lost all his bait.”
Bait. My fist clenches at the word. A sour taste pools onto my tongue.
“What if you were wrong?” I spit out. “What if he murdered another woman? That was a chance you were willing to take?”
“He didn’t, though!” Tate cries. “And we didn’t know how to tell anyone without Charlie getting in trouble. He was a teenager the last time Dad dragged him along. Just a few years away from being a legal adult. We couldn’t be sure he’d be safe.”
From the corner of my eye, I see Mom sag against the counter. I have no strength inside me to hold her up, keep her standing. Instead, I watch her slip down until she’s kneeling on the floor, head dropping into her hands, sobs muffled by her palms.
“You could have told the police about the shed,” I say. “You could have said you just found it. Left Charlie out of it altogether.”
Tate shakes her head. “What if Dad admitted that Charlie and Andy were part of it?”
The thing in my stomach goes still. Its claws retract, the blood it drew going dry. Now, in place of that pain, my body burns, as if struck by lightning, my bones scorched and sizzling.
“You’re wrong about Andy,” I say. “He would’ve told me.”
But even as I say it, I know it’s a tattered, worn-out belief, one that hardly fits anymore. In truth, there was so much he didn’t tell me: about Ruby; about why he hacked at trees, why anger brewed in him sometimes, severe as a storm; about why he felt our family was unnatural—
I stop right there.
Dread gathers inside me. One by one, my memories of Andy slot into Charlie’s story.
“It’s true, Dahlia,” he says now. “Why else do you think he had a key to the trapdoor? Dad gave him one. Just like he gave one to me.”
I shake my head, still fighting it.
“And why else would the murders have stopped after Andy was gone? Dad couldn’t do it without us. He said that once: ‘I couldn’t do this without you, Charlie.’ Like it was something for me to be fucking proud of. Well, apparently he couldn’t do it without Andy, either.”
I try to stop the thoughts flying through my mind. But it’s too late. They’re swarming together—
Andy insisting we needed to leave
—buzzing around each other—
Andy swinging at trees like there was something inside him he couldn’t get out
—flapping their furious wings—
Andy telling Ruby, “Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?”
Now, Mom moans so loudly on the floor, it sounds like it’s happening in my head. But as I watch her crawl closer to Charlie, chugging out sobs, I realize the moan is mine this time, gushing from between my lips.
I clamp my hand over my mouth, as if I could hold back the truth: Andy’s role in Jessie Stanton’s murder, in the murders of Alexis Shea and Amy Ragan before her.
I think of their Honoring dates, scrambling to do the math as my stomach curdles. Andy would have been eleven when Dad killed Alexis. Only seven with Amy. Just a boy, like Mom said.
But with Jessie, he was days from sixteen, tipping toward adulthood, transitioning from boy to man.
“He was so disturbed that week,” I say, thinking out loud. “After Jessie Stanton, he was so on edge. He wasn’t even sleeping.”
Now, I focus on Charlie, aiming my words at him. “He was old enough, at that point, to really understand it. So do you think… do you think he threatened to tell someone? And maybe Dad—”
A sob punches out of me, sudden and searing.
“Did Dad kill Andy?” I finish. “To keep him quiet?”
“No,” Mom cries. “No. No. No, no.”
But then Tate hangs her head. And that’s when I know. She’s already come to this conclusion. For ten years, she’s known what Dad was. And when she learned that Andy had been killed, she didn’t cry or scream or stay in bed all day. She got to work on a diorama—exactly as she did for all the other victims of the Blackburn Killer.
I swing my gaze—slowly, heavily—between her and Charlie. “All week,” I say, voice low, breath shallow, “you’ve watched me suffer, trying to figure this out. You told me to trust the family, Charlie. To trust you. And Tate. But the whole time, the two of you knew Dad killed Andy. And you said nothing.”
“No!” Mom howls. “Daniel did not kill Andy! He was sick that night. He was very ill!”
Hunched on the floor, she balls up her hands like she wants to punch the tile.
“He was sick!” she repeats. “Your father was very sick! We were up all night.”
The first time she mentioned this, I felt such relief that she could prove Elijah wrong. Now, I almost pity her, how hard she’s working to hold this conviction, one she should already see crumbling.
“You must have fallen asleep,” I suggest.
“No.” Mom stamps her denial into the air. “And even if I did, I would have woken up if he left. Or… or when he came back.”
“Like you woke up all the other nights?” Charlie snarls. An old anger, scraped up from somewhere deep, shadows his words.
Mom gapes at him, aghast. “I… I didn’t…” She closes her mouth, swallowing.
“You’ve always been a very deep sleeper,” Tate tries gently. “It has to have been Dad. Who else would have reason to hurt Andy? Who else could be so violent?”
“I wasn’t asleep!” Mom yells. “Daniel was sick!”
Still on her knees, she slouches forward, digging her head into her flattened hands like somebody deep in prayer. Or, I consider instead, like somebody begging.
“Oh Charlie, why did he…” she starts. Sitting up, she reaches for Charlie’s foot, but his leg jerks away so suddenly her palm slaps against the tile. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Why did Daniel mur-murder all those women?”
Charlie chokes out a scoff. “How the fuck should I know? You think we chatted about it?”
“Please,” Mom pleads. “He didn’t… He didn’t say anything?”
In Mom’s question, I hear the echo of my own—You didn’t say anything to each other?—when I asked Charlie what he and Dad spoke about while hunting.
The beauty of nature, he answered. Appreciating nature.
Now, at the memory of that response, I tremble. My insides hum with horror.
Dad killed deer, Charlie told me, to preserve their beauty before time destroyed it. And now I see the photographs—those women who will never change, never age, will only lie broken but beautiful in their ice-blue gowns—mounted on the wall like the head of a deer.
“Why?” Mom persists. “Why would he do it, Charlie?”
When Charlie answers this time, his eyes are twin torches burning into Mom. “Fuck his reasons!” he shouts. “It’s never about the killer’s reasons, right? Because it can never be justified. You taught us that. And now you want me to rationalize a psychopath’s behavior? You married him, Mom. Why don’t you know?”
He pauses, features pinching together. “Why didn’t you know?” he screams.
The question reverberates once, and then it’s gone. Still, it spears us all, pinning us into place with the real questions behind it: Why didn’t you see what was happening? Why didn’t you save me?
In my head, I hear them in Andy’s voice.
“I don’t know,” Mom whispers. “I still can’t believe—”
“You never paid attention to what was really going on. You focused on films and newspapers and your shrine of portraits, all to hold on to your pathetic lie about your parents. You made me say their names!” he explodes. “In all those Honorings, I had to say the names of women I’d… And I had to hear Dad say them too! All because, what? You think there’s comfort in darkness? In other people’s suffering? You spent years steeping us in murder, but you don’t know the first thing about it. You have no idea how hideous it looks, how disgusting it smells. You thought Dad was okay with living in the darkness you created here—but you had it all wrong; he was the darkness. Why the fuck didn’t you know that?”
Mom’s face is slack with shame. “I don’t know,” she says again. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s not enough,” Charlie huffs. “You were the adult. You loved him, and you refused to see what he was hiding right in front of you.”
Mom searches Charlie’s eyes, but he refuses to look at her.
“Charlie, you… you have to understand.” Her words break as she cries. “I had no one when I came here. I’d lost everyone who meant something to me. Couldn’t even keep up with friends because of the lie I was telling.”
“The lie was your choice,” Charlie seethes. “You could have corrected it.”
“And Daniel,” Mom continues, “he wanted me. He gave me a family again. He gave me you.”
As Charlie scowls, face turned from her, tears creep into his eyes.
Mom stretches toward him, even as he inches away. Tate envelops him tighter now, rocking him slightly, her chin resting on top of his head. And just like that, he goes limp in her arms, like the fire he was spewing only moments ago has been extinguished.
“But you’re right,” Mom whispers. “I didn’t know. And I’m so sorry.”
Her palm hovers above Charlie’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she repeats. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” She touches him, and though he flinches, he doesn’t lurch away. “I’m so sorry.”
She buries her head in his shoulder as Charlie stares ahead, nose wrinkled, eyes brimming. The sheen of tears looks strange on him; I’ve never seen him cry.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.”
The words are stifled against Charlie’s shirt, but to me, they’re louder than ever.
I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know, Andy. I’m sorry.
Tate reaches across Charlie to put her hand on Mom’s arm. She grips her tight, locking Charlie between them, holding him in a cage of what she thinks is comfort. Tears spill over onto Charlie’s cheeks the same second they slide onto mine. Tate looks up at me, blue eyes big and imploring, ringed with red from tears of her own. Silently, she begs me to join them on the floor, to be a part of their misery, their circle of solace—but how can I? How can I possibly hug these people, each of whom kept such horrifying secrets?
“We have to tell the police,” I say. “Let them know they’re right about Dad.”
Tate sucks in a breath as Charlie snaps his gaze up at me.
“Dahlia, no,” Tate says.
“We have to. What if they arrest someone else for the murders? Like Fritz!”
“They won’t arrest Fritz,” she argues. “They have nothing on him because he wasn’t involved.”
“So someone else then. Either way, they need to know everything Charlie told us.”
Charlie’s reply is stony. “You’d throw me to the wolves like that? Andy, too?”
“The police will understand. Dad forced you to do it. You were only kids.”
“We were teenagers, too.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Dahlia.” Charlie drags his hand down his face, raking away his tears. “The islanders still want to see someone go down for the murders, and the only person left with any involvement is me. I trusted you with this, I shared it with you. And now you want to take it to Kraft, just hand him the evidence he’s hunting for so he can prove that his dad was right about us all along? That the Lighthouses are monsters?”
“It’s not us, it’s Dad, it’s—”
“Is that what you want for Andy?” Charlie presses. “For people to remember him like that, as someone who played a role in the Blackburn Killer’s crimes?”
Beside him, Mom sobs.
“Is that what you want?” Charlie repeats.
Of course it isn’t.
I’d hate for that to be my brother’s story, for people to view Andy’s murder as a punishment he earned. I can already hear the islanders, gleeful with what they think is justice: Well. He helped a killer. He got what he deserved.
My eyes drift to Mom, whose tears keep falling. Her gaze sinks to the floor, heavy with everything we’ve learned and lost. Among it all, I hope she recognizes this devastating truth: the roots she planted on Blackburn Island, grown from the seed of a single lie, have been rotting from the start.
“Dahlia?” Tate prompts.
But I don’t respond. Instead, I leave my family where they sit, huddled together, waiting for my answer. I hear them calling after me, but I don’t turn back.
Upstairs, I stand at the threshold of Andy’s room. I hesitate for only a moment before walking toward his beanbag chair. When I flop onto it, the dust of our years apart billows around me, clouding a room, a boy, I once saw so clearly.
My whole life, I trusted him, trusted only him, and I thought he trusted me, too—enough to confide in me when someone was hurting him, when something made him feel cut up inside, like Charlie described.
And Charlie—if he’d just told someone, if he’d exposed Dad for the killer he was, then it never would have happened to Andy, who spent his too-brief life flashing in and out of frustration, digging his ax into trees as if, in wounding something else, he’d become woundless himself.
“Goddamnit, Charlie.”
I say it out loud, even though he’s too far to hear me, enshrouded by people who will ignore his sins to soothe his suffering. But as the words come out, I know they’re the wrong ones. I look at Andy’s bed, empty for a decade now. For so long, I made myself believe he’d return to this place, or at least to me, because the alternative was too agonizing to consider. But now, glancing at floorboards that will never again creak beneath his feet, I know: it isn’t Charlie I’m furious with. What Dad did—it would fuck with anyone’s mind, their sense of right and wrong. In truth, I’m furious with myself. For never noticing. For not being someone Andy thought he could tell. For refusing to go all those times he said we should leave. For keeping him here, stuck in the grip of a killer, until he was killed too.
Waves of sobs crash through me, torturous and tidal.
I assumed the chest beneath the shed was split by Andy’s ax, that he found the key somehow, went down to that room, but then was killed before he could show me what he’d uncovered. I assumed it because I couldn’t fathom a world in which he would choose to carry such crushing secrets alone. But I didn’t know him. Not his thoughts. Not his pain. Not the tenderest parts of his heart. All these years, I’ve been searching for, yearning for, a stranger.
Even worse: he harbored something so dark inside him, something no child should ever be near, let alone have to know.
But it’s not true, is it, that he didn’t try to tell me? He said our family was unnatural, too decked out in death—only I never wanted to listen. I wanted only to exist in the bubble of us.
Charlie, Tate, Mom—they’re all downstairs, arms tangled up in one another, the space between them squeezed to almost nothing. It’s okay, I imagine Tate saying, we’re here, Charlie, we’re here.
And I’m in a dead boy’s room, the cool air my only company. I’ve got no one to hold me but myself.