“Why would he stick around after all of that?” Nathan asked. “You got out, why didn’t he?”
“Lorelei won’t go,” Emma said. “That’s the house she lived in with her husband for decades. She told me once that leaving here would be leaving him.”
“Lorelei, that’s his grandmother?”
Emma nodded. “She was an amazing teacher. An amazing artist, too.”
“Right. You said she was your painting teacher,” Nathan said. There was an odd tone to his voice, one that set the hairs on her arms on end, though it was perfectly civil.
“That’s right.”
He gave her an unreadable look. “You never told me you used to paint.”
“Yeah. I did. Is that so strange?” Emma asked, shrugging one shoulder.
“It’s just that I’ve never seen you even doodle a stick figure,” Nathan said.
Emma neatly folded up the plastic bag the cameras had been in and took it over to the trash. “It was all I wanted to do back then. I was going to go to art school.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked.
“I didn’t even graduate high school, remember?” He’d made such a big deal about it when they were getting to know each other. How interesting her “alternate life path” was. How he respected different ways of finding success. “I needed something that would get me a job right away, and I got a scholarship for a web dev course. And then I guess… I don’t know. You lose a dream and it starts to hurt to even remember you ever had it.”
She was out of things to busy her hands with and folded her arms awkwardly.
“You keep coming up with new surprises,” he said. “I can’t help wondering what’s going to be next.”
“I’ve never hid anything from you about us. About the present. My past—I left it behind. I didn’t want it to touch us.”
“How can I believe that? What other secrets are you keeping?”
She didn’t answer, looking away instead.
“I’m not the police. I’m not our nosy neighbors. I’m your goddamn husband. You know something about what happened, don’t you? You wouldn’t have to keep all these secrets if you didn’t knowsomething.”
“We promised. All of us,” Emma said.
His gaze sharpened. “Promised? Emma, did your sisters do something?”
“I don’t know.”
“Emma.”
“I don’t know,” she insisted. “The things I saw could have meant a lot of things.”
Her phone chimed. Eager for a reprieve from the conversation, she pulled it out of her pocket. It was a text from Gabriel, with a photo attached.Found this. Thought it might be relevant, it said.
It was a dark photo, taken in the Saracen house. The couch was filthy and stained, but not chewed through; the writing on the walls looked fresh. Logan Ellis, son of Arden’s beloved police chief, had his arm around the shoulders of a girl with big brown eyes and dark hair, spilling loose over her shoulders. She looked nervous, but excited. She wore a plaid skirt and a low-cut blouse under a faux-leather jacket.
Juliette.
There were three other kids in the photo, two crammed on the couch and one sitting on the arm. Emma only recognized one—Elaine Chen, the chain-smoking lead singer of their high school’s resident rock band. Next to her on the couch was a Black guy with a silver stud earring and a goatee who looked like he might have been college age. The other girl, the one perched on the arm of the couch, was white, slim, not exactly pretty but impossible not to notice, with sharp features and intense eyes.
She was wearing a red flannel shirt like a jacket, unbuttoned down the front. Emma had seen a shirt exactly like that before. On Juliette, when she stumbled into the house in the early hours of the morning, the day their parents died. It could have been a coincidence. Except for the other thing.
Juliette’s shoes. She had her knees together, her body pinched inward in discomfort. On her feet were a pair of masculine black boots. Doc Martens, their laces cinched unusually tight.
As if to make up for the fact that they were too large for her feet.