“GET OUT!”
Everyone goes still when I scream. The only sound is a baby’s wail.
My hand, closed around the note and label, shakes at my side. The papers scratch against my palm until I shove them into my pocket.
“GET OUT! Get out of here now!”
Two roomfuls of people stare at me like fish. The only one who moves is Charlie. He sinks onto the couch in the living room, arms slack at his sides.
Footsteps rush from the back hallway, marching up behind me. “What’s going on?” Elijah asks, his notebook already out.
“Get out!” I yell in his face. Then I turn to the dozen visitors still gaping at me. “All of you! Leave! Get out of here! Go!”
I stomp toward the front door, yank it open to reveal more people dotting our lawn. Their heads all turn to me at once, alert and expectant.
“What is wrong with you?” I scream at them. “Get off our property! The museum is closed!” I whirl around to the people in the house. “Get the fuck out!”
For a few seconds, nothing happens. The baby keeps howling; the eyes keep watching. Finally, Elijah steps forward. “Come on, everyone,” he says, voice deep with authority. “Time to go.” He waves his hands, ushering bodies toward the door.
They listen to him, confused but indignant looks plastered to their faces. One by one they walk past me into the dimming light outside, shooting me glances that drip with judgment. The reporter tries to appeal to Elijah. “Press, too?” she asks. He nods and gestures for her to leave. As the last person files out, Elijah flips a page in his notepad and pulls his pen from his pocket.
“You want to tell me what that was about?” he asks me.
I glance over his shoulder, into the living room at Charlie. He’s staring blankly at the wall opposite the couch, arms limp. If I hadn’t just seen him nod—that ghastly, gut-wrenching nod—I would think he was catatonic.
“Dahlia?” Mom says. She and Tate stand near the back hallway, looking from me in the foyer to Charlie on the couch.
Elijah waits—and I consider it: keeping him here to witness the confession I’m about to pry from Charlie. Afterward, he could haul him away in handcuffs, throw him in jail, get him out of my sight forever. But Elijah’s pen perched above his pad feels too much like the fishy eyes of all those islanders.
“Leave,” I tell him.
He looks through the living room doorway at the statue of Charlie on the couch, then slings his gaze back toward me. “I think I should—”
“Get out! The fucking spectacle is over!”
He winces at my shout, but after a moment, he nods. “I’ll come back soon,” he says—and it’s meant, I think, as a warning.
“You do that,” I mumble.
As soon as he crosses the threshold, I close the door behind him.
“What’s this all about?” Tate asks, and when I turn around, she’s already drifting toward Charlie in the living room, the magnet of her body pulled toward the magnet of his. She hesitates, watching his vacant expression, before sitting down beside him. “Charlie?”
I make my way to the living room, too, stopping when I’m across from him. The coffee table squats between us, covered in old newspapers. Mom steps into the room so quietly she might as well be floating.
“Dahlia, you’re scaring me,” she says. But I ignore her.
“You wrote Andy’s note,” I say to Charlie.
Tate scoffs, but I acknowledge her for only an instant before glaring at Charlie again. “You did,” I say.
Finally, he shifts his gaze from the wall to me. Chin tilted up, he opens his mouth, looks for a moment like he might deny it, but then his shoulders drop, and more than anything else, he seems exhausted.
“Yes,” he says.
My heart rages as Tate gasps beside him. “Why?” she asks—and I can see from the shock on her face that this is news to her; this is something Charlie never shared.
“Yes, Charlie.” My voice is remarkably hard. “Why?”
A vein bulges at his temple when he clenches his jaw. “You know why,” he says quietly.
“I need to hear you say it.”
He exhales slowly. “I did it to cover it up.”
Now my heart bangs so violently, it feels like it might break my ribs.
“Cover what up?” Tate asks, and it’s almost laughable, how she still doesn’t get it.
Charlie’s eyes go blank. “That I killed him.”
“No.” Mom falls into a chair at the same second Tate gasps. “No,” Mom repeats. “No, no, no”—and just like that, it’s last night again, our mother uttering her syllable of denial.
Something splits open inside me, darker than the chasm I’ve carried since we learned of Andy’s death. It’s a black hole yawning wide, sucking up my last, lingering traces of light.
“What do you mean, Charlie?” Tate cries. “Why would you— What happened?”
I lock my knees as he begins to speak. I tighten every muscle.
“That night,” he says, voice already hoarse, as if he’s at the end of the story instead of the start, “part of me was relieved to have finally told someone. To have told Tate. But another part felt claustrophobic, like the past was breathing down my neck. So I went outside for air. And I heard this thunking sound. It was—”
He doesn’t need to say it; I know that sound so well.
“—Andy’s ax. He was railing on this tree, back in the woods a bit. He was so worked up, I-I tried to talk him down.” He stares up at me. “I tried to help him, Dolls. I swear. It was the first time I’d talked to him about it, openly. He knew it had happened to me, too, but we’d never spoken about it. It was too awful to acknowledge. We were both so ashamed.
“I tried to tell him, though. Tried to convince him that this would end for him soon. In a couple years, he could leave and he’d see there was life on the other side of… of Dad. I told him he could be anyone he wanted to be. He could go to college, go anywhere really; he could start a family that’s nothing like ours. And he stopped then. He seemed to latch onto that. I thought I’d calmed him down, that he’d be all right. But then…”
His Adam’s apple bobs. He turns his head toward Tate, whose eyes are wide with horror—but still soft somehow. Still supportive. In her chair, Mom rocks herself back and forth.
I don’t move at all.
“Then what?” Tate whispers.
“He handed me his ax. And I took it. I thought it meant he was feeling better. But then he—oh, fuck—” He rakes his hand over his face, and my stomach lurches. I steel myself for the blow I know is to come. “He told me to kill him.”
“What?”
It’s not the blow I expected. It’s not a blow I believe in at all.
“That can’t be true,” I add.
Charlie shrugs one shoulder. “He did. He told me to kill him. ‘Before I do more damage,’ he said. And I knew that desire. Of course I did. The desire for someone to see it. To stop it. To make him… not a part of it anymore.”
He glances at Mom, lip curled back to bare his teeth.
“But I still tried to talk him down. I told him it’s Dad who does the damage, not us. But I knew that wasn’t true. Even if we never touched those women, we were culpable. And he could see that I knew it. He kept begging me to kill him. Truly begging me. He got down on his knees. Said he couldn’t live with what he’d done. He said, ‘I love her, Charlie, but anyone who dares to love me will only be ruined.’ And then he said I was wrong, he couldn’t have a family, could never have kids like anyone else, because all he would do is fuck them up. He had no hope anymore. That’s what he kept saying. That there was no hope for him.”
Charlie looks at me, and I’m a deer caught in the headlights of his eyes. “I didn’t get it at the time—what had triggered him that night; I knew Dad had killed Jessie Stanton the week before, but it seemed like more than that. Something fresh. But now—what is it, Dahlia, that he said to Ruby Decker, when she told him she loved him, when she brought up a future they could have together?”
My mouth moves without speaking, lips stitching together the silence. Then I swallow, throat huge, and mumble out the words: “ ‘Who knows what I’d do to a kid? Who knows what’s in my blood?’ ”
“In my blood,” Charlie repeats. “Fuck. When he said ‘I love her’ that night, I thought he was referring to you, Dolls. That he didn’t want to ruin you because of what he’d done. But when you told me about that embroidery thing, I realized he must have meant Ruby. He loved Ruby.”
My lungs betray me, admitting no air.
“And I get how that would have undone him,” Charlie continues, “having to reject someone he loved, just to keep them safe. Of course he felt hopeless after that, like he’d always be alone. I know that feeling—I’ve never lasted more than a month in a relationship. The second they get serious, I have to get out. Even when I’m crazy about them. Especially when I’m crazy about them. Because how could I let anyone love me? How could I inflict my true self onto someone I care about? I swear, when someone says they love me, it only makes me hate myself more. Because I don’t deserve anyone’s love, not after what I’ve done. I don’t even deserve it from my sister.”
He looks at Tate when he says this, not me. She shakes her head, lips parted but wordless.
Charlie drops his head to stare at his hands. Tate grabs them with her own.
“And god, this museum,” he says. “I was standing here, Ruby’s story running through my mind, and I just couldn’t… I couldn’t do it anymore. Perform. Pretend. It’s exhausting, you know. I’m always so fucking tired.”
He locks his eyes onto mine.
“So I put the note out. Publicly. Immediately. So I couldn’t chicken out, I couldn’t go back. I knew you’d see it, and you’d know, and the whole performance would be over. Because that’s always been the problem. It was my performance, my insistence on ignoring the past, on keeping it quiet, that brought Andy to the point he was at that night—that dark, impossible place where he begged me to kill him. He said he didn’t have the guts to do it himself because he was such a coward, he’d always been a coward, ‘We’re such cowards, Charlie!’ ”
It stuns me, how clearly I hear both my brothers in the sentence. I glance at my empty, trembling hands. Andy never told me he felt like a coward, but I knew him enough to know that he fought with trees to fight his feelings. I can picture him snarling those words.
“And suddenly,” Charlie continues, “I was looking right at him, but I couldn’t even see him anymore. I just saw myself. The confused and terrified kid I’d spent years trying to distance myself from—through miles, through auditions, through every role I played on every fucking stage. And it was all there that night—all that rage and shame and self-loathing, just under the surface of my skin, still leaking out of me from sobbing it all to Tate. And I couldn’t stand to look at him. At me. So I swung the ax. And I killed him.”
My legs collapse under me. My knees slam against the floor, palms slapping the wood. As tears soak my face, my shoulders shake with sobs and my stomach clenches like a fist.
My brother. My twin. My beautiful, unknowable Andy.
The pain sears me inside. When I open my mouth to howl, my breath scalds my tongue.
“And I buried him,” Charlie says above my sobs. Above Mom’s sobs, too. Above Tate’s. We are three broken women, at the mercy of a story from a broken man. He doesn’t cry at all.
“And I wrote the note. And the next day, I got the hell out, and I’ve never come back until now.”
I press my forehead to the floor. My chest convulses as I cry, my throat already raw. Behind my closed eyes, I’m seeing the boy in the credenza, the one who held my hand and shushed me in the dark; I’m seeing how his tongue touched his upper lip when he carved his name into wood, when he claimed a little something of his awful world for himself; I’m seeing him crash into his beanbag chair, seeing him stand by my bed, pulling me from a nightmare I didn’t know I was in; I’m seeing him smooth down his hair, seeing it spring back up, seeing both of us laugh at his untamable parts.
I want to latch my fingers onto his. I want to tug him free of our father’s grip. And I want to go back and know him—really fucking know him—and tell him that, even in that knowing, I love him, I love his untamable parts.
I stay on the floor as long as I need to. A long time. A really long time. Sobs threaten to tear me apart, to crack me open like an earthquake does the ground. But my body is relentless; it keeps me together, trapping my agony inside me—a sharp, ricocheting thing.
When I finally drag my arms off the wood, lift my head to look at my family, I see that I’m the only one left crying. Mom’s gaze is wet and haunted and fixed on Charlie, but her tears have paused for now. Charlie keeps his eyes on his lap, folding and unfolding his hands, glaring at his own fingers like he wishes they belonged to somebody else. Tate is watching our brother so fiercely I imagine he can feel her stare like a windburn on his cheek. Her lips are pushed to the side, like she’s deciding on something, and even before she speaks, I know that what she says will make me sick.
“We’ll keep it a secret,” she tells him.
And there it is, a tidal wave of nausea, about to take me down. “We’ll what?”
“He’s suffered enough,” she says, whipping her head toward me. “And you heard what he said: he was only giving Andy what he wanted—a way out. Right?”
She looks at Mom, who’s frozen in her chair. “I…” Mom says, but when seconds pass and she doesn’t continue, fury rockets through me, blasting through my grief.
“You can’t possibly agree with her,” I seethe. “He killed Andy. He killed your son!”
“He says… he says Andy wanted that,” Mom murmurs.
“Andy wanted help! Or that’s what he needed, at least. Not an ax in his fucking skull!”
“I know. I know. And that’s my fault. I kept it…” Mom bows her head. “I kept it too dark in here to see the real darkness. I should have noticed. I should have protected you all so much better than I did.” Her breath shivers as she exhales. “I’m so sorry, Charlie. I’m sorry I didn’t know.” She lifts her eyes to him. “I didn’t protect you then, but I can protect you now. Tate’s right, you’ve suffered enough.” She clasps a hand over her mouth, triggering her tears. “My god, how you’ve suffered!”
Tate nods eagerly, watching Mom. Then she pivots toward me. “Please, Dahlia.”
“You’re crazy,” I fume. “What do you think is going to happen? The police are closing in on Dad. Elijah was here today, nosing around the house, and it’s only a matter of time before they find definitive proof that Dad was the Blackburn Killer. And once they do, they’ll—”
“They still won’t know about Charlie,” Tate says. “Or Andy. And we don’t have to tell them. We can play dumb, pretend we had no idea about Dad. We can let them assume it was always him, alone out there, and that he murdered Andy, too.”
No. No way. Charlie took my brother from me, he killed him, instead of getting him help. He never spoke up, for all the years it happened to him, and that was the problem, that’s what made Andy the person he became: someone without hope. And now they want me to keep quiet, too?
I’m already shaking my head as I look at Charlie, but his expression stops me. He still isn’t crying, but there’s anguish on his face so jagged it seems like it would cut me if I touched him. Gone is his confident swagger, his condescending smirk. All that’s left is pain. And I know—despite my fury, I do understand—that it’s pain that’s always been there, that the swagger and smirk have been masks to protect the tortured boy beneath. I know, now, that it was like that for Andy, too, that even when he screwed up his face to hack at trees, his hardened features were just a cover for his raw and chronic suffering.
And if Andy really wanted to be gone…
No. I clench my jaw, rejecting the thought, pressing my teeth together as it tries to creep back.
If Andy was truly begging Charlie to end his suffering…
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I sob at Charlie. “You’ve lied for years, and even when you confessed last night, you still held something back.”
Charlie nods, glaring at the coffee table. Then he looks at me. “You’re going to have to take my word for it,” he says. “Is that going to be enough?”
For me, it never has been—not even with Andy, the one person in this world I told myself I trusted. I never took him at his word when he said there was something wrong in our house. And look how that turned out. I made him my entire world, and I still didn’t know enough about him to save him; I still didn’t trust it was true when he told me we needed to leave.
And now here’s Charlie, asking me to believe him, to trust that the gaping hurt in his eyes is a symptom of truth-telling.
But it could all be an act. Another role he’s learned to play.
“Please, Dahlia?” Tate says again—only this time, it’s a question instead of a statement, a desperate plea. When I look at her, I see it all over her face: the fierce and painful love she has for Charlie, a love that’s us-against-the-world even though he’s made this world so hard.
My sobs slow as I consider her. How much did Tate have to bleed for her dioramas, knowing that her brother had been a part of their gruesome story, knowing that she could make the story smaller, make it bite-size, but she could not make it gone? How much bitterness has Tate swallowed down over the years, just to keep the sweetness of her relationship with Charlie?
I think of my own coping mechanisms—my incessant searching, my conviction that my twin and I knew each other’s minds—and now, taking in my sister’s tear-streaked face, it’s like I’m seeing her for the first time. We’re so similar, it turns out: loving someone who’s shattered, holding them so tightly, as if our arms could keep them whole. And I know, I know, that if the roles were reversed, if Andy had been the one to kill Charlie, if it had been his hands on the ax, his swings that ended my other brother’s life, I wouldn’t have told a soul. It wouldn’t have been right, maybe—but it would have been love.
Everyone’s waiting for me to answer. Mom’s fingers push against her lips, eyes set on mine. Tate leans forward, begging me without any words. And Charlie—I try to read his face: how his cheeks seem hollowed out; how his jaw juts back and forth. I could choose to see it as something he’s rehearsed, an expression he’s crafted to appear vulnerable, ashamed, tortured by years of trauma. Or I could choose to see it as truth. I could choose to believe my brother—the only one I have left.
“I’m sorry, Dahlia,” he says, and his voice is so small, cowering at the back of his throat. “I’m sorry to all of you. Mom, Tate. And fuck, Andy, I—” The sentence cuts off, snipped like a string, and he shakes his head, leaving it dangling.
“But Dahlia,” he continues, “I know what I took from you. I know your loss is different. And I’m always sorry. I’m always so fucking disgusted.”
I picture what could happen next: Elijah coming back, hauling Charlie off to a sealed-up room, just like the one beneath the shed. Could I really do that, send him back there, even if the punishment would fit the crime? Is that what I want for my brother—to relive the worst of his life, to be stuck in a cell with the ghost of our father, to grip the bars and forever feel the handle of the ax?
Who would that benefit? Who would that save?
“He wanted to die?” I ask Charlie. “You swear to me—no more lies, no more confessions after this: Andy begged you to kill him?”
It won’t be enough to make it okay. But I need to be sure.
Charlie’s head sinks toward his chest. Moments pass, the room strangled of its air. Then, blinking out a tear that races down his face, he nods.
“And you didn’t intend to do it?” I press. “You didn’t kill him because… because he wanted to tell someone about Dad, and you wanted to keep your involvement a secret?”
He snaps his head up. “I wouldn’t have done that. I didn’t even see Andy anymore. I only saw myself. And I wanted to… I wanted to kill that part of myself. The crying, begging, hopeless part. But not Andy. I never wanted to hurt him.”
“But you did,” I say. “You hurt him instead of helping him.”
He looks like I’ve hit him, eyes round and sad like a little boy’s. Still, he nods again. “I know,” he says.
I nod, too.
I couldn’t save Andy. I didn’t see his whacks against trees the way I should have: as a cry for help, as proof that he needed more than I alone could give him. But as I stare at Charlie, at all the pain kept caged inside him, I see that I have the chance to save someone else.
Finally, belief sinks into me, spreading across my bones. I marvel at the weight of it: heavier and lighter than I thought it would be.
And though it hurts like hell to say it, the words like barbed wire on my tongue, I force them out: “I won’t tell.”
Tate and Mom exhale in relief, but I thrust a hand into the air. “On one condition.”
Tate narrows her eyes. “What condition?”
“Charlie needs help,” I say. “Look at him.”
His expression hasn’t softened—no sagging of his features that would mean he’s letting go. It’s all inside him still: shame, self-loathing, immeasurable misery. He’s taut with it right now, limbs tense, face almost gnarled.
“It isn’t over for him,” I say, “just because he told us what happened. He’ll still be performing, out in the world, with everyone else, and it will continue to devour him. And then who knows what he’ll do—kill someone else, maybe?”
“I’d never,” Charlie insists. “I never wanted to hurt Andy, I swear. I don’t want to hurt anyone, not ever again.”
“Not on purpose,” I say. “But you kept everything inside you, all bottled up, for so long. It’s no wonder it exploded out of you like that. And now who knows what could happen the next time someone triggers you, like Andy did that night.”
“So…” Tate draws out the syllable. “What are you suggesting?”
I wipe a hand across my cheek, feel the tears that spill, even as I speak. “Actually, you suggested it. Therapy.”
“You told her I should go to therapy?” Charlie asks Tate.
“No! I told her”—she glares at me—“it’s not an option.”
“It’s going to have to be. He needs to see a therapist. And not just him! We all do! We—”
I stop, squeezing my eyes shut, trying to dam up my tears. I wait until I’m no longer crying, and then I open my eyes to begin again.
“We’ve been so isolated, all our lives. Everyone thinks they know us, but nobody does. Tate, you said yourself, it’s hard for you to make friends. And it is for me, too! But even worse than that”—I think of Greta, the hurt warping her face as I told her to go—“I’ve pushed away the only one I have. And I don’t think that’s normal. We’re not normal.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom murmurs. “I did that to you all, I’m so sorry.”
“See?” I say. “This is what I mean. Yeah, Mom, you fucked up. Actually, ‘fucked up’ doesn’t begin to cover it. But what is your plan to move on from that? Are you going to apologize the rest of your life? I don’t want that for you. And Tate, I want you to have friends, not just followers. We need people in our lives. Not just gossipers. Not just ghosts.”
I look out toward the foyer, at the shrine of Mom’s parents hanging above the stairs. It strikes me now: How different, really, are those picture frames from my laptop screen? For years, she and I have kept them pinned in place, the people we’ve lost, but we’ve really only pinned ourselves.
“We’ve all done things we can’t take back,” I say. “And I don’t know how to keep those things from eating us alive. We need help. Outside help. Andy never had that, and then he—” I fight back a sob. “Charlie needs help, Tate. More than any of us can give him.”
“But he can’t tell the therapist what happened to him,” Tate argues. “He’ll go to prison if he does.”
“I’m not saying he has to tell them. But he needs to learn how to deal with his emotions. All the performing, the pretending—that’s what Dad conditioned him to do. And look what it’s done to him. He still keeps everything inside, and it’s nearly killing him. Even today—you saw what he was like during the museum. He seemed like he was in physical pain.”
Tate squints, still skeptical. Mom opens her mouth, closes it again, while Charlie stares at me.
“Either you get help,” I say, speaking only to him, “or I go to the police and tell them everything. That’s my condition. That’s the only way I can live with this. The only way I will live with this. You need to get yourself the help you didn’t get for Andy.”
For a while, he only looks at me, eyes tracing patterns across my face. I expect him to break our gaze, to turn toward Tate, see what she thinks he should do. But his focus remains on me. I watch his stare darken, his brows draw together. And now I see the Charlie I’ve always known: the guarded one, the one with all the masks.
Before I know what I’m doing, I stand up, lean across the table between us, and place my palm against the side of his face. At first, it feels hard beneath my fingers, as if I’m touching only bone—but then his breath hitches and he lifts his hand, cradling mine as I cup his cheek. For a few moments, we hold each other like that, his skin foreign to me, but familiar, too.
“Dolls,” he whispers, so tenderly it makes my throat swell.
“Will you do it?” I ask him. “Will you let someone help you?”
He sighs deeply and it somehow changes his eyes. They brighten a little—just a little—like a night sky inching toward dawn. Then, still pressing my hand to his face, my brother sighs again and nods against my palm.