Now
Yellow wallpaper. White grip.
Red hand.
If she closed her eyes, she could remember the weight of the gun. The charcoal and sulfur smell. The deafening crack.
She remembered the bits of bone and hair and pink tissue in the hole through her father’s skull. Heard, echoing in her mind, her mother’s scream, and felt the heat of her blood as JJ knelt down and put a hand against the gushing wound on her chest. Her mother’s hand had closed briefly around her wrist as her breath gurgled in her throat, and then it went slack.
She had tried so hard to think of any explanation but the obvious one.
“Something changed that night,” she said. The others were silent, giving her time to find her words. “I realized I couldn’t keep doing it—pretending. Eventually they were going to find out what I was up to. I kept thinking that they’d kill me. And I kept thinking about how much I hated them. I’d taken something and had too much to drink—I was out of it. I had Logan’s gun, and…”
“How did you get the gun?” Emma asked.
“It was Logan’s,” JJ repeated.
“Right. But how did you get it? Did he give it to you? Why?” Emma asked.
“Does it matter?” Daphne asked.
“She’s asking whether I planned to do it. Whether it was premeditated,” JJ said, and Emma gave her a nod. It would matter if it came out. “I honestly don’t know, which I assume means it wasn’t—at least, it wasn’t a plan I made while I was in my right mind. I didn’t have the gun when I left the Saracen house. I must have gotten it after, but I can’t remember much. Just Mom and Dad, and then—then the next thing I remember is you.”
Emma’s look was bewildered. “What about your clothes? Your hair?”
“According to Logan, he and another friend found me out of my mind and completely soaked through. I have no idea why,” JJ said. “They gave me the clothes I was wearing and got me home.”
Emma didn’t say anything for a long time, sitting with her fist pressed against her stomach.
“You saved me,” JJ said. Emma’s eyes lifted to hers. “They never pushed me too hard. And when they tried to make you sound bad, I didn’t fight them. I let them suspect you so that they wouldn’t suspect me. I’m sorry.”
“It’s what I chose,” Emma said, her voice a croak.
“I was the oldest. I was supposed to protect you,” JJ said. And she never had. All those years in this house, she’d told herself she was being smart, that she was keeping her parents happy and that it mattered. But she’d never stepped in to take a punishment for Emma. She’d never told her parents off for the way they treated Daphne.
Emma looked away. Tears shone in her eyes, but she blinked them clear. “Did you kill Nathan?” she asked.
JJ’s throat constricted. “No,” she said, as clearly and fiercely as she could, and Emma turned to look at her. “No,” she repeated. Emma’s chin dipped once, almost imperceptibly, and she felt something knit itself together between them.
“What happened?” Emma asked.
She hesitated. “I brought over a bottle of wine. He invited me in. We had a glass. We talked. I figured we’d chat and I’d find a way to mention the carriage house and ask if I could poke around. But I—it didn’t work out.”
She didn’t mention the second glass. The way he’d leaned in toward her and the way she hadn’t leaned away, because it was useful, and she’d laughed brightly and let her hair spill to the side the way guys always liked. She hadn’t realized things were going too far until he put his hand on her knee, in that way perfectly calibrated to be excused as innocent if she reacted badly. And she had reacted badly. His expression shuttered. He all but kicked her out.
She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t known what she was doing. But she hadn’t expected him to be so eager to cross that line.
“I left. Nothing happened,” JJ said.
“Nathan called Ellis that night. Told him he’d found something,” Emma said.
“That’s good, isn’t it? If Ellis knows what was on the drive—” JJ began, but Emma shook her head.
“He didn’t say what he’d found, apparently. Which makes it seem just as likely that it was something that would implicate me. Or one of you two, and either way, they’ll think I eliminated the threat. Or they could just ignore that and say I killed him over the affair. The woman he was sleeping with got threatening emails from someone trying to break them up. I’m sure they assume it was me.”
“Nathan was cheating on you?” JJ said, eyebrows raising. “Fuck that guy.”
Emma’s hand cracked across JJ’s cheek. JJ reeled, grabbing at her face. Emma reared back, mouth dropping open. “Shit,” she said. “JJ—”
“It’s fine,” JJ said, clipped. She rubbed her jaw. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
Emma cradled her hand in the opposite one, looking appalled at her own violence. “You’re right, though,” she said. “He was—he cheated on me. It started after I was in an accident. I couldn’t—it was months before he and I…” Her cheeks colored. “There was a lot on his shoulders. It was hard on him,” she finished.
“If I say anything, I’m going to get slapped again,” JJ said, unable to keep the disgust from her voice.
Emma winced. “Hell of a family reunion,” she said.
“We’re out of practice,” Daphne replied generously, and Emma laughed.
“It’s not like we ever got along,” Emma said.
But that wasn’t true, was it? There had always been those few stolen moments, when they escaped their parents’ world and found their own. Those nights in the tree house, shoulder to shoulder, whispering their secrets to the night.
Emma stood.
“Where are you going?” Daphne asked.
“I need to think,” Emma said.
“Emma. No one can know about this,” Daphne said.
Emma’s eyes tracked from her to JJ. JJ’s lips pressed together, but she said nothing. “We’ll see,” Emma said, and turned away.
JJ sat in the sunroom, watching fireflies appear and vanish again, lazy in their luminescence. She was breaking Vic’s rules again, on her second drink, Dad’s decanter on the side table next to her.
The house was so strange without them in it—her parents. She’d expected to find it haunted—not literally, of course, she didn’t believe in ghosts. But for all that things were largely the way she’d left them, the most curious thing was how absent her parents really were. All these years she’d had the sense that they were still out here, just hidden away inside these walls, only for her to discover that the house had been nothing but an empty box all along.
The house wasn’t haunted, she was forced to admit. She was.
“Mind if I sit?” Emma asked. JJ startled; she hadn’t heard her come in. She waved to the other chairs in an I won’t stop you gesture, and Emma settled in. She glanced at JJ’s drink on the side table and leaned forward, nudging a coaster across the coffee table in her direction.
JJ winced. “Sorry. Vic hates how much of a slob I am.”
“It’s fine,” Emma replied. She regarded JJ, a knuckle set against her teeth. “You were such a neat freak when we were kids.”
“I had to be,” JJ reminded her. Irene Palmer had very much been of the “cleanliness is next to godliness” school of thought. Your hands weren’t clean until you’d scrubbed under your fingernails and left your skin red. Owning anything you didn’t actually need was an invitation for a lecture on clutter.
“You never knew how to pick your battles,” Emma said.
JJ laughed. “Isn’t it the other way around? You made everything a fight.” It had frustrated her to no end, watching Emma turn every tiny thing into a war. The instant their mother suggested she do something, Emma had to do the opposite, even if she’d meant to in the first place.
“You broke yourself avoiding the smallest reprimand,” Emma pointed out.
“Yeah. And then I overcorrected,” JJ said, wincing. “One of the hardest things Vic and I did was figure out how to fight without hurting each other.”
Emma made a noise in the back of her throat. She looked out the window, her hands limp in her lap. “Nathan and I never fought.”
JJ bit back her immediate response. That maybe a fight was what they’d needed. Emma had mentioned the affair like it didn’t even faze her. The Emma JJ had known would have been absolutely feral if someone treated her like that. The slap had been the first glimmer of the old Emma that JJ had seen from her so far.
And that was her fault, wasn’t it? She was the reason that Emma had to learn silence. Learn how to hide. Emma had never bent a millimeter to protect herself from their parents, but to cover for JJ she’d broken herself completely. And JJ had done nothing to earn it.
“Guess we were both fucked-up in our own special ways. Turns out yours was healthier, though. It didn’t turn you homicidal.” She looked down at the glass in her hand. “I never said I was sorry. Or thanked you.”
“Was it worth it?” Emma asked. It wasn’t the question JJ had expected. Emma sat with her body pinched forward, elbows on knees and hands tightly pressed against each other. “I don’t mean you lying. I mean what I did. Tell me it was worth it.”
“I like my life,” JJ said. “Did my best to fuck it up for a long time, but now—Vic, and the apartment, and even my job … I’ve been happy, Emma. More than I thought I ever could be. Yeah. It was worth it.”
“Then I’m glad I did it,” Emma said.
JJ looked at her in disbelief. “How can you say that, after everything you went through?”
They’d all hid. And so none of them had been able to help one another. Each wrapped up in their own tale of survival, their own dream of escape. It had taken disaster for them to offer anything to one another, and by then the only thing they had to give was silence. No wonder they had scattered.
“What if I’d told them the truth? We could have told people what they were like. Maybe…”
“They wouldn’t have believed us,” Emma said. “It wasn’t the simple kind of evil that you can understand. They were mean to us. So what. Dad hit us every once in a while. There wasn’t any sexual abuse—right?” She looked carefully at JJ.
“No. Not me. I don’t think Daphne,” JJ said, revulsion making her voice strained. At least they’d been spared that much.
“He was obsessed with us being virgins,” Emma said. “Remember how he used to make us sit in front of him and he’d hold our chins and look us in the eye and make us swear we’d never done anything with a boy?”
“Yeah. That was when I realized I was way better at lying than I thought,” JJ said. She’d been terrified the first time she’d had to go through that little ritual after her interlude in the car. But he’d looked at Emma with far more suspicion than at her.
“When did you…?” Emma asked.
“Long before Logan,” JJ allowed. She wasn’t embarrassed by her past, but it was different talking to someone who had known her before—who had known the mask she wore.
“It never got back to Dad?”
“I was careful only to fuck guys who also had something to lose,” JJ said. “Or guys who weren’t from town.”
“But you’re gay,” Emma said, and JJ gave a bray of laughter.
“Yeah, but I also wasn’t that self-aware,” JJ said. “It was never about the guys anyway. It was about doing something for myself—something forbidden. Less fucking, more a ‘fuck you.’ Did you…?”
“No. I was actually—I didn’t have a boyfriend until I was twenty-two. He was the first,” Emma said, cheeks coloring. “Took six months to work up to it. It’s not like I’m a prude, it’s just—it always felt dangerous, to be that vulnerable.”
Sex had never made JJ feel vulnerable. Not even when it was stupid and risky. It had made her feel invincible.
“I slept with Nathan on the first date,” Emma went on. “I knew that I would mess things up. Run away. Find a reason not to trust him, not to stay, not to care about him. So I decided that I would never be the one to leave. That I would choose him, starting then, and never waver.”
“Even when he cheated on you.”
“That was his choice. I made mine,” Emma said, defiant.
“You don’t think you deserved better than that?” JJ asked.
“No one has ever loved me more than Nathan did,” Emma replied, and JJ couldn’t say anything to that. Emma stood up. She walked around the coffee table and then perched on its edge, only a couple of feet separating her and JJ. She reached out and took the tumbler out of JJ’s hands, and JJ offered no resistance. Emma swirled the whiskey in the bottom of the glass, inhaled.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” JJ said fiercely. “I won’t let you go through that again.”
“We’ll get through it,” Emma said. “It’s not going to be okay. It’s already not okay. But we’re going to survive it.”
“That’s not good enough,” JJ said. She looked away, blinking back tears. “You’ve got a baby coming. You’ve suffered enough for what I did already. If it helps you at all, we have to tell the truth.” She’d been given fourteen years; she couldn’t ask for more, not at this cost.
“They’re not after me for our parents. They think I killed Nathan, and you didn’t do that.”
“You have to—”
Emma stood, cutting her off. She gave the glass back to JJ and sighed. “Juliette—confess, or don’t. But don’t tell yourself you’re doing it for me.”
With that, she walked away.
JJ had thought that confession would bring—what? Peace? Some kind of release, at least. But it hadn’t changed anything. She’d waited too long, and now her truth alone couldn’t save Emma.
Maybe nothing could.