“No. Not long at all,” Daphne said. “Days, maybe a week or two, in my experience. Though I’m not a doctor.”
“You’ve done this a lot, though,” Jenny said, almost a question. Daphne nodded, and Jenny looked away, scrubbing a tear from the corner of her eye with a kind of viciousness. “It’s not like we haven’t known it was coming.”
“That can make it easier, but it doesn’t make it easy,” Daphne recited.
“I should make sure Lisa and Drew come by,” Jenny said absently. She shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t mean to keep you.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Daphne reassured her, and Jenny flashed her teeth reflexively.
“Right. Tomorrow,” she said. She stood at the door, watching the whole time as Daphne made her way to her car and pulled away, gravel crunching under the wheels as she drove toward the distant lights of the city.
Later, alone in her apartment, Daphne turned on the television for some ambient noise and opened up her laptop. She clicked through a few bookmarked links, navigating to the fake profiles she had set up on various social media sites. Emma didn’t have any kind of social media presence, but her husband did. Nathan. Daphne had met him once. At the wedding. Emma had looked so shocked to see her there, it was almost funny.
She hadn’t even recognized Daphne at first—which Daphne supposed she couldn’t entirely fault her for. The last time they’d seen each other, Daphne had been a skinny teenager, no longer starved for her mother’s approval but still starving herself. It took a fainting spell in the middle of class and Mrs. Sawyer’s refusal to accept her excuses to get the help she needed, but slowly she had learned to cherish the taste of food melting on her tongue, and to love the soft contours of her body as they grew, the way moving through the world no longer hurt and how her body was no longer her enemy. Her face was full and round now, her eyes bright, her arms thick and strong. She took up space, and she liked it.
Once Emma had gotten over her shock, she had introduced Daphne to the groom, and with a kind of awkward haste attempted to integrate Daphne into the proceedings. She’d been all smiles and I’m-so-glad-you-could-make-it, but Daphne could tell Emma resented her presence, that this was not a welcome surprise.
As for the groom, she’d had only a brief conversation with him, and then her observations over the course of the evening to judge him by. It was enough to know he was a weak man. He preened when he got attention and sulked when he didn’t, took anything but adoration as a personal affront. Emma deserved better—but then, she had always played the part of caretaker and martyr in relationships. She had no faith in any relationship based in equality.
Now Daphne perused recent photos of Nathan—Nathan alone, Nathan with Emma, Nathan at happy hour with friends. There was no sign of what could have precipitated the message until she found the comment at the bottom of a photo from a few weeks ago, posted days after the photo had been taken. Love you, bro! We’ll miss you. Sucks not to see you every day. One of Nathan’s work friends. So Nathan was out of a job, then.
Still, moving back home seemed extreme. Daphne sat back in her chair, tugging on her lip. Could it be possible that Emma had found something out? Remembered something? Was she going back because—
No. There was no reason for Emma to go back now. To renege on the agreement they had all sworn to, sealed with the blood of their parents. There was no reason to open that long-closed door. Not intentionally.
But it would be wrenched open.
Which meant that Daphne needed to start making certain preparations. She needed to get control of the situation, before Emma stumbled into something she shouldn’t.
She considered whether to contact the colleague—not a friend, despite his best efforts—who sometimes filled in for her with clients. But surely she had some time—more than Dale did, at least. She could see this project through to its natural conclusion.
She pulled up another tab on her browser, another fake profile. This time she was looking at a woman with rich dark hair springing in wild waves around her face, all but smirking at the camera. “Hello, Juliette,” Daphne murmured to herself, and began to dig.
5
EMMA
Now
The house had not changed—it had stagnated. Locked up away from the world, its wallpaper had yellowed, peeled. Its floors were grimy, its windows unwashed. The furniture lay under shrouds of thick plastic, and the plastic itself was coated with something gritty and strangely sticky under Emma’s fingertips.
She started with the ground floor, piling the plastic coverings in heaps in the corners. She moved through the sunroom, the wicker chairs faded to dingy gray, the damask pattern of the cushions nearly indistinguishable. She skirted around the piano in the great room, avoiding it for now, and drifted through the living room, where a massive and now worthless old TV dominated the space. Then there was the formal dining room, the kitchen and breakfast room, the library, the study.
She moved the rug from the foyer into the hall to cover up the stain. It looked incongruous, the wrong size and the wrong shape for the space, making it obvious that it was covering something up. After a minute of staring at it, she moved it again. At least there weren’t any stains in the study—the rug that had once sat under her father’s favorite armchair was gone, and so was the chair itself.
Nathan joined her as she went upstairs. The doors on the second floor were shut firmly, and she stood at the top landing, unmoving. Nathan’s hand rested on the small of her back.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Not remotely,” she said. But she squared her shoulders. Her room first. That seemed easiest.
The door stuck, and she had to shove at it before it sprang open. She blinked in the dim light. She flicked the light switch. The bulb was out. Nathan walked past her to pull open the curtains, sending out a cloud of dislodged dust. Sunlight slanted over the white bedspread, the pale pink wallpaper, the delicate white vanity in the corner next to a matching dresser.
“Huh,” Nathan said, turning in a circle to take it in. He gave her a curious look. “I definitely thought I was going to learn something about your boy band preferences, but you don’t have a single poster.”
He was trying to keep things light, but she grimaced. “We weren’t allowed to put up posters. My mom chose everything in here,” she said. When she’d left, she hadn’t taken much. A suitcase full of clothes, a few odds and ends. The books lined up on the dresser were the sweet teen romances her mother bought for her. Emma had always preferred horror and science fiction, but her mother disapproved of anything violent or contrary to reality.
“Should we check out the master?” Nathan asked, somewhat unsubtly. Emma gave a stiff nod. Her parents’ sanctum. Opening the door felt like a transgression, but with Nathan at her back she didn’t feel she could stop.
Her mother’s taste suffused this room, like the rest of the house. Airy and light, sophisticated and classic. Only the bed broke the mood—huge, and carved out of dark oak that gave it a weight and intensity that so overpowered the rest of the decor that it was like a gravity well in the middle of the room.
She walked across to the bed and ran a palm over the bedspread. The fabric was cool to the touch. Her hand came away dusty.
“Should we … I mean, are we going to sleep in here?” Nathan asked doubtfully.
“It would be ridiculous not to, wouldn’t it? The rest of the beds are twins,” Emma pointed out.
“It won’t be too weird?”