Page 58 of No One Can Know

He wasn’t on the road and out of reach, though, he was thirty steps away, and she was being ridiculous. She would poke her head in. Say good morning. Say she was sorry, yet again, and hope that this time it was enough.

She put her phone away and arranged her face in an expression of what she hoped was only casual interest. She made herself walk unhurriedly out the door.

The lock on the carriage house door was undone, sitting on the step. She pulled the latch, swinging the heavy door open, and stood at the threshold. Dust swirled inside, lit by the slant of sunlight coming in; the interior was dim, and her eyes struggled to adjust. It had been decades since a horse or carriage had been inside this building, but two stalls remained to the far right. The rest of the space had been left open to store the actual carriages, but her father had converted it into a workshop, for those times when he decided that being a man meant cutting up pieces of wood and screwing them together in a different configuration. There were workbenches and a variety of tools set against the walls, including a table saw and a miter saw and otherthings that might have been worth a bit of money, if they were anything close to new or functional.

“Nathan?” she said. No answer. She could feel her pulse at her throat. “Nathan, are you in here?” she asked, though it was obvious that he wasn’t.

Then where was he? Where would he go without the car?

Unless someone picked him up, she thought, and chased that idea off into the shadows again.

There were footsteps in the dust, crisscrossing the floor. She followed them inside, lacking anything else useful to do. She stepped around the side of the big worktable in the center of the room, and she froze.

Nathan lay on the ground beside the worktable. His eyes were half-opened. One leg was twisted awkwardly under him where he had fallen. His T-shirt was stained dark, a single neat hole in the fabric at his chest. His face had a look of vague surprise.

Emma stared. All her time imagining the grim possibilities of fate, preparing herself for them to become reality, suddenly made it impossible to comprehend that this was, at last, real.

Nathan wasn’t dead. She was sitting on the couch, and in a moment he would walk in and tease her about it and ask how long she’d decided to wait after the funeral before starting to date again, and she would pretend to chuckle and the knot in her stomach would ease. Because it wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t. How utterly unlikely was it that one of those awful things she had imagined so many times wouldactuallycome true?

But she had always known they could.

She turned around, a ringing sound in her ears. She stumbled back into the open air, gulping down one breath after another that didn’t seem to be sufficient, and suddenly the world tipped and her vision filled with brightly colored lights that swarmed and swelled, and she felt her knees impact the drive, gravel digging into her palms that splayed against the ground.

Then suddenly she wasn’t alone—there was someone there, a blur of teal, the sharp bark of a dog.

“Here you go. I’ve got you,” someone was saying. Emma was dimly aware of being helped to her feet, guided—or more like carried—toward the house. As she stepped inside, her vision went dark again, and she felt her legs giving way, heard the quick, alarmed exclamation of her rescuer—and then, mercifully, nothing.

29DAPHNE

Then

The night her parents die, Daphne sits in the tree house, her arms around her knees. She’s too old for the tree house. It’s a child’s refuge, the ceiling so low that even she has to stoop to fit inside. When they sleep together out here, it’s so crowded they jam knees and elbows into each other all night long. Not that they ever sleep together out here anymore. Sometimes one or the other of her sisters will join her, but Emma hasn’t in weeks, and Juliette always slips away after night falls, whispering to Daphne not to tell.

Everyone keeps secrets. Daphne keeps everyone’s secrets.

If you are quiet enough, small enough, people begin to forget that you still have eyes and ears, that you can hear their murmured conversations and see their furtive errands. Daphne listens at the door to her father’s phone calls, and she knows about the drawer of secret things that her mother only brings out on special occasions, when their father is out of town. She knows the two cars that come to the house on those days, the black Taurus and the blue Impala. They’re both animals, the bull and the antelope, and she feels like this should mean something.

When the blue Impala comes, her mother puts on makeup. She slides into the passenger seat and rides away, and comes back breathless and giddy.

On those days Daphne worries about the smallest of her secrets. The things that she has gathered up, the things she can’t prove butthinks about often. The color of her eyes, the skin that doesn’t freckle in the sun, her cleft chin.

What her mother is doing is dangerous.

When the black Taurus comes, it’s different. That man comes into the house. Her mother doesn’t dress up for him. She hands him money. He leaves. But he hasn’t been back since the last time, almost two months ago. “I don’t want to be involved,” he told her mother. “This isn’t what I signed up for. You can have them, but if anyone asks, I’ll tell them I’ve never heard of you.”

The secrets gather inside her. She’s rarely told a secret, but she can’t keep them all inside, so on days like this when the pressure grows too intense, she walks out to the bridge over the river. She takes her secrets, whispers them into a stone, and drops them off the side of the bridge to the rushing waters below. The stones carry her secrets to the river and the river swallows them up. But she has no stones now, no river, and so many secrets.

I told Dad about Emma’s applications. I pretended I didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to be applying, but I knew.

She is furious with herself. She wanted Emma to stay, because if Emma leaves, it will just be Juliette. With only Juliette as a point of comparison, Daphne won’t have any chance of pleasing their mother. Without Emma, Daphne won’t have anyone to turn to when shedoesearn her anger. Juliette doesn’t understand her like Emma does. She had to dosomething.

She scrubs her hands over her tear-stained cheeks. And then she hears it—the footsteps in the grass, stumbling and staggering. She looks out the window. In the darkness, it is hard to make out the figure below, to tell light brown hair from dark. Her sister—whichever of them it is—suddenly sprawls, stifling a cry of pain. Daphne almost calls out to her, but then the figure is back on her feet and running through the woods. She’s dropped something: a bit of light from the house is enough to see the faint trace of metal in the dirt.

Daphne shimmies down the ladder, curiosity banishing her tears.She scuttles forward, fingers already snatching at the air, the dirt. Her grasping hands find the small, cold bit of metal and curl around it. She knows what it is by feel. She considers tucking it away in one of her many hidey-holes, but her curiosity is not a patient creature. It turns immediately to kneading claws at the back of her mind.

Dad is in his study. Mom is safely asleep. Easy enough to go in the back door and to the computer in the corner of the great room. They’re not allowed to have phones or computers in their rooms. The internet is, after all, a wilderness full of pedophiles and socialists.

The icon pops up on the desktop and she double-clicks it with a delightful churning of anticipation in her gut, hoping she’s not about to read Juliette’s English homework or something equally boring.

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