Page 21 of No One Can Know

“Sure of what?” he asked, voice muddy with sleep and the slow fade of pleasure.

“How can you be sure I didn’t do it?” Emma asked.

Nathan lifted his head. His hand rested on her thigh, possessive. “You say you didn’t. I believe you.”

She shook her head. It wasn’t enough. “You don’tknow,” she said. “Even if you think I didn’t do it, you don’t know whodid. So you’ll wonder. And that means you’ll wonder about me.”

“I won’t,” he promised. He was such a bad liar.

“She’ll wonder,” she said. Her hand slid over her lower abdomen. “Someone will tell her or she’ll go looking, and then she’ll wonder, and I can’t—I can’t—”

Nathan curled his hand around hers, ran a thumb over her knuckles. “We’ve got a long time to figure it out.” He paused. “She?”

“Just trying it out,” Emma said.Itandthe babydidn’t feel real. She needed it to feel real. She needed there to be a reason.

“A girl would be nice. I’d like that,” Nathan said, and pressed a tender kiss against her stomach. She shivered. “Then a boy. One of each.”

“My dad wanted a boy,” Emma said. She hadn’t remembered that in years. “He was so happy with Juliette, but that was before he started to think he wouldn’t get a son. I was a disappointment. Daphne was a disaster. They kept trying after that. Mom got pregnant again when I was seven. She lost it when she was five months along. It was a boy. Mom wanted to name him Randolph Junior, but Dad said he wanted hislivingson to have his name. She named him Anthony instead.”

Her mother had called them into the hospital room to meet him. Emma had expected him to look like her baby dolls, but he was rubbery and shrunken, swaddled in blankets that didn’t look soft enough for his delicate skin. Her mother wanted them to kiss his forehead, touch his hand, hold him. Emma wanted to run away. She loved her brother but she couldn’t see how this could be him. She darted out the door. Outside, her father caught her by the arm and slapped her in the face. He’d forced her to go back in.

He never went into the room himself.

She found herself telling Nathan this, something she hadn’t thought or spoken of in many years, but now it seemed like the most important thing, the only thing. The words dried up on her lips, and she looked at him and instantly thought she had made a mistake. A look of revulsion pinched his features. He already knew she was damaged. She shouldn’t have put this on him, too.

“That’s awful,” Nathan said, after too long. “Grief… it does strange things to people.”

“It wasn’t out of character for him,” Emma said flatly. “Nathan. There’s a reason people thought I might have killed my parents. I hated them.”

“Everyone hates their parents,” Nathan said.

Where had she heard that before? “I wanted to kill them. I thought about it so many times.”

Nathan was quiet, his thumb playing back and forth over her thigh. She could tell he wanted to be anywhere but here.

“But the thing is,” Emma said. She fell silent. Then pressed on. “The thing is, I never once thought about how I wouldget away with it. I never thought about hiding it.”

“Maybe that means you didn’t really want to do it,” Nathan said. “You were just angry.”

She made a noise that was almost agreement, but she didn’t think that was quite right. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to kill her parents. It was that she knew if she did, there would be no point trying to save herself.

That was why she had hated shooting so much, every time her father made her go out. Because every time she pulled the trigger, she felt like she wasn’t just destroying something else. She was destroying herself, too.

She remembered the kick of the gun. Yelping. Her father’s laugh. “That’s just the recoil. It’s not gonna kill you.”

She’d known that if she killed them, there was no point trying to get away with it. There was no getting away. Not then.

And not now.

Something thumped downstairs. Emma jolted upright.

“What was…?” Nathan began, and then Emma’s nose, so sensitive since her little houseguest moved in, caught an alarming scent.

“Smoke,” she said, leaping from the bed. She bolted out of the door and down the stairs, the sweat cool on her bare skin. She saw at once the warm, wavering light splashed against the foyer wall—the fire was in the dining room. The dining room, where the wall was covered in paint thinner.

She darted left instead of right, toward the library. The armchair there had been covered in a heavy drop cloth instead of plastic, and it was still folded near the wall. She’d grabbed it and was running backby the time Nathan came down the stairs—he’d taken the time to pull on his briefs.

“What—” he started, but she just grunted.

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