Page 19 of No One Can Know

9JJ

Now

Nathan and I are going to be staying at the house for a while. Wanted to let you know.

Emma’s number wasn’t even in JJ’s phone, and when the unknown sender’s text had arrived, it had taken her a solid thirty seconds of reading and rereading to figure out it hadn’t been sent to her by mistake. And another minute to remember who the fuck Nathan was. It was over an hour before she mustered the coherence to text back.

What did she care if Emma and her boyfriend (husband? They’d gotten married, hadn’t they?) moved into the house? It wasn’t like she ever wanted to. She’d be happy if it burned to the ground.

She sat on the balcony, on the deck chair wedged into the narrow space next to Vic’s alarming number of plants.

She reached into her pocket, pulled out the silver lighter. There was a bumblebee etched in the metal, landing on a flower. She flipped it open, closed it. Flipped it open again. Lit the flame. Flicked it shut, the sound satisfying.

Emma knew something. She’d found something out.

There’s nothing to find.

We covered our tracks.

She had taken comfort in those words for years, but now they seemed tissue-paper thin, no protection against possibility.

She had never been sure what Emma knew—or guessed, or suspected—about that night.

She might not know anything. She might know everything. It was all the territory in between that frightened JJ the most.

“Here’s what we’re going to do.”

JJ was the oldest. She was supposed to be the one looking after her sisters. And instead, it had been Emma who leaped into action, told them what to do. And then, when Hadley had settled on Emma’s guilt, she’d still never said a word about what she’d seen. Emma had let all that blame and suspicion fall on herself. Carried all the sin and shame of her family.

“You can’t change the past. You can’t take back what happened, to you or to Emma. The best you can do is protect yourself now,”Vic had told her more than once. Easy enough when protecting herself had meant staying quiet, staying out of the way. But that was over.

“That’s it, then,” she said to no one. Flicked the lighter open. Flicked it shut.

She remembered closing her fingers around that cold metal, hands in her pockets, water dripping down her back.

She hadn’t run from her past all these years so much as she’d ignored it. It was finally done ignoring her. And now it was time to choose—stay here, and risk Emma destroying the life JJ had built for herself. Or find a way to protect it.

Except it wasn’t really a choice at all. She couldn’t just hide and hope that the world spared her.

If she wanted her secrets safe, she was going to have to do something about it.

10EMMA

Now

Emma knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Long after Nathan went up to bed, she remained downstairs, stalking from room to room. She furiously dusted a bookshelf, threw open a closet to shove old coat hangers and ancient wrapping paper into a trash bag, abandoned it to scrub the grime from the powder room faucet. She lurched from room to room and task to task, completing nothing.

And every time she walked through the foyer and the dining room, the words on the wall taunted her.

MURDERER

KILLER

PSYCHO

She’d heard them all. Whispered behind her, spoken boldly to her face. She’d left Arden Hills, but the rumors had followed her to her new high school. The principal and teachers had made noise about making sure the school was a safe place for her, but in their eyes, she’d seen the same questions.

She’d dropped out. Christopher Best had tried to talk her out of it, and her next foster family had reenrolled her in school, but with less than a year until she aged out, it wasn’t like anyone was really paying attention when she just didn’t go. It wasn’t until she was on her ownthat she got her GED, got herself into community college—far away from Arden Hills.

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