She hadn’t lied.
She’d let him lie for her.
“Was it an accident?” he’d asked.
“They never found the person,” she had said, and let him think it was the answer to his question. Let him imagine screeching tires and winding roads.
Now, after the sun had set and they’d retreated to bed, she fixed her eyes on the slanted light from the street that stole through the blinds.
“My parents didn’t die in an accident,” she said. She felt him shift behind her, felt the weight of his attention. “They were murdered.”
“Your parents were murdered?” Nathan asked, hurt and accusation and bewilderment braided together plainly in his voice. She could read every strand. She turned, finally, to face him, but the shadows stole the contours of his expression from her.
In the safety of the dark, she told him. How they had died in the house. Been shot. A bullet to the brain, a bullet to the heart. A missing gun.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I didn’t want that to be what you knew about me,” she said. “I didn’t want to think about it.”
He was silent. She could feel something between them, a rebalancing. His mistake weighed against her secret.
“You need to know,” she said. She traced her fingertips down the side of his face and silently prayed as she had so many times—a prayer of a single word. Stay, stay, stay. “If we go back, you’re going to hear some things.”
“What kind of things?”
“You’re going to hear that I did it,” she whispered.
He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, his words were toneless. “Did you?”
“No. It wasn’t me,” Emma said. She wondered if he believed her. She wondered if anyone had ever believed her.
He rolled over, half on top of her, her legs trapped beneath his. “It will be okay,” he told her. “We’ll be okay.”
His tongue slid between her teeth, and she wondered if he tasted the secrets lingering there.
The secrets still hidden within the walls of the house that was drawing them, inescapably, home.
2
EMMA
Now
Arden Hills was like a dead tree in a forest. Even as it rotted, new life had sprung up, feeding off the decay. Real estate agents and New York transplants took the place of beetles and fungi, that was all, and in a few years all that would be left of the version of the town Emma had grown up in would be a heap of rich loam beneath the new growth.
Outside of town, hobby farms cluttered the landscape, their chicken roosts decorated with faux-distressed signs reading LADIES ONLY or THE HEN HOUSE, decorated with shutters and windowsill planters.
“We could get chickens,” Nathan said, startling Emma. This whole trip, they’d ridden in silence, thin as the skin on a cup of milk left out on the counter and yet never broken.
“You want chickens?” she asked, trying to imagine Nathan scattering feed to a quartet of clucking hens.
He nodded thoughtfully, thumbs tapping the steering wheel. “You said the house is on a bit of land, right?”
“A little over two acres out back,” she said absently.
“We could do chickens, a vegetable garden. Hell, maybe we could get goats,” he said. She didn’t point out that he didn’t even own a pair of boots, or that his one nonnegotiable expense when they moved into the duplex was hiring a landscaping company to handle the postage stamp of a yard.
She didn’t point out that this was supposed to be temporary.
“Fresh eggs would be nice,” she said instead.
He grinned widely at her, and her heart thumped once behind her ribs, hard. This was going to work out. Wasn’t it? He wasn’t angry anymore. He was talking about chickens.
“Are you sure you know what you’re getting into, going back there?” Christopher Best had asked her. She’d called him three days ago, in the middle of packing up. It had been years since they’d seen each other, but she still called every once in a while. Kind of pathetic, that her lawyer was the closest thing she had to family.
“People in Arden don’t forget,” he’d said. But maybe he was wrong.
A few miles from the house, Emma directed Nathan toward the gas station and grocery store by the roadside. They’d need food, and she didn’t know if there would be basic supplies like toilet paper at the house.
They got out of the car, stretching limbs that had started to calcify on the long drive. Nathan laced his hands over his head and arched his back. His shirt rode up, baring a lightly furred belly, lean but without definition. Emma watched him from the other side of the car, falling without meaning to into a game she often played—imagining she was seeing her husband for the first time, as a stranger. What would she make of the scruff of beard on his jaw, his unusually long and elegant fingers? If they met again, would they ever have a second conversation?
She turned the game on herself, imagining what he would see. Thirty years old, with auburn brown hair she kept in a low ponytail. Skin that tanned easily and broke out in freckles every summer, a wardrobe of jeans and T-shirts and slouchy sweaters to throw over them in the colder months. She always thought of herself as nondescript, which was why it had puzzled her so much when Nathan showed such ardent and consistent interest in the beginning. She was soft-spoken, sometimes quiet to the point of paralysis. She had always been more comfortable talking to clients through the anonymity of the internet. She wasn’t good face-to-face.
“You’re a hard one to get to know,” Nathan had told her once, two months in. She wished that he had told her when he figured her out. So he could explain to her who she was, what she was like.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he said.
“Just looking at you,” she said, and he smiled, pleased at the attention. She tipped her face up to his to kiss him, and they walked into the store together hand in hand, the touch tender, as if each was afraid the other would pull away.
Inside, Nathan drifted off to peruse the shelves of novelty mugs. She grabbed a basket from beside the door and headed toward the groceries. Her stomach roiling, she shopped like a picky toddler—graham crackers and peanut butter, a bag of cashews, a loaf of bread, raspberry jam, cereal. She spotted a tub of candied ginger and scooped some into a bag, remembering vaguely it was supposed to help with the nausea, which had arrived with calamitous intensity, as if making up for lost time. She hadn’t been able to keep a proper meal down in days.
She added some frozen meals, disposable plates, and cutlery to the basket. At the last minute, she grabbed a bottle of white wine from a rack. It wasn’t champagne, but this wasn’t the housewarming they’d planned, either. Still, it felt wrong not to have something to toast with, even if she couldn’t have more than a sip. Nathan was waiting at the register, a pack of toilet paper brandished like a prize.
As the woman at the counter rang up the groceries, Nathan chatted with her, his usual patter of friendliness. He liked to talk to people. Strangers in line, on the bus, sitting next to them at the movie theater. People opened up to him. Told him about sick grandparents and empty bank accounts and cancer scares before they even knew his name. It was nice, having him around. No one ever thought to talk to Emma when he was right there beside her.
“ID?” the cashier asked brightly, cheeks rounded in a smile, still looking at Nathan. Emma handed it over. The woman’s eyes flicked down, up, down again, and the smile creased into a frown. “Emma Palmer?” she said, voice pitched too high.