Page 31 of No One Can Know

She should leave, she knew. But before she did, she got down a loaf of bread and popped a slice in the toaster, started a pot of coffee to brew. Eating first thing, before even getting out of bed, helped with nausea, and there was nothing like the scent of coffee to make going downstairs less of a chore. While the bread was toasting she picked up Emma’s phone, considered a moment, and entered four numbers to unlock it. It worked right away. Nathan’s birthday.

Daphne wondered if Emma understood that using her husband’s birthday wasn’t a sign of how much she loved him but its opposite. For someone else it might have been a gesture of affection, but for Emma, Daphne thought, it was a way of reassuring herself that Nathan was the center of her world. And she wouldn’t need reassurance if it were true.

Emma certainly wasn’t the center ofhisworld. That much had become clear, however well he thought he had covered his tracks. Anger burbled inside her. Emma deserved better. Daphne would never understand how her sister had let herself settle for a man like Nathan.

Daphne found the location tracking app easily. She checked the usage statistics—it hadn’t been opened in the last three months. Perfect. She entered her own information, confirmed the link on her phone, and granted herself permission to track Emma’s location. Then she closed the app, turned off the phone, and positioned it exactly where Emma had left it. Another quick trip to put the toast on Emma’s nightstand—and then Daphne took a risk, and leaned over, pressing the softest kiss against Emma’s brow before retreating. Emma, deep in sleep, did not stir.

She looked peaceful, Daphne thought as she exited the house. But you could see the signs of sickness in her. That was what all of this was; a restfulness that concealed infirmity. It couldn’t last.

She walked back to where Winston was waiting, tongue lolling out. She gave the carriage house one long look. The door was locked, with no other good way to get in. She’d have to leave it for now. At least she felt better now, with Emma’s location easily accessed. Hopefully it would prove an unnecessary precaution. But Emma had always been curious. Her artist’s eye quick to pick up on things out of place. And if she started to see the things that had been hidden all this time…

Daphne shook her head, making her way quickly back to the street with Winston trotting alongside her. It wouldn’t happen that way. Daphne would be there, to shape what happened next.

And she would do whatever she had to.

15EMMA

Then

Two months, more or less, before she burns her sister’s bloody clothes in the fireplace grate of an abandoned house, Emma stands examining a painting.

It has taken half a year of pleading to convince Emma’s parents to let her buy oil paints. She has made do with acrylics and watercolor, but she glories in the romance of the oils. She researches their origins and ingredients, imagining herself the painter of older eras, grinding pigments from minerals and roots, mixing them into the oil herself. Her paints come, of course, from tubes, purchased with her carefully hoarded money one color at a time, so that the bloom of new hues across her canvases become a way to mark the march of time.

Lorelei teaches her. The hardest part is the patience, waiting for each layer to dry, unfinished, the promise of possibility shimmering in her mind’s eye. Her mother hates the stink of it—the oil, the turpentine. The way it stains her fingers and her clothes, splatters and lines of paint crawling up her forearms, decorating her face. There is nothing ladylike and pristine about painting. She emerges streaked in umber and sienna, cadmium and vermilion.

Her work is always sloppier, clumsier than she would like. She rushes; she waits too long; the paint cracks, it smears. Lorelei tells her patience, patience. Worry when it looks perfect, because that meansyou’ve caught up with your own ambition and judgment. Dissatisfaction is the engine of creativity.

Lorelei is the one who encouraged Emma to consider schools farther from home. She has a talent, but that’s not what Lorelei prizes. The girl hasdrive, the kind of hunger that won’t be sated until she has the chance to give herself over to it completely, and that means instruction, proper instruction, more than Lorelei can give her. She needs to be surrounded by other people as hungry and obsessed as she is. The schools she tells Emma about are in Georgia, California, even Europe. Emma says again and again that she has to stay close to home, but the hunger says otherwise.

Emma has filled out the applications. It’s absurdly early, she knows, but she wants the essays and forms out of the way so that she can focus on her portfolio. She needs eight—wants ten. She has, over the last year, managed seven she deems adequate. Three watercolors, two in acrylics, one in charcoal, and one, the painting of Juliette at her piano, in oil.

Today she stands in her room, scrutinizing what may be the eighth piece. It sits on her bed, propped against the wall, as she paces back and forth, examining it from every angle. With this, she will have enough to make her applications, and a few more months to manage a final two—or to replace some of those she is less certain about, like the watercolor that shows the bridge over the river near the house, with its curls of water folding in on itself and the light slanting low. It is competent, but it says nothing, and she worries that the judges will think her point of view is shallow.

This piece, though—she thinks she likes it. It is nothing special, in a way. Only a portrait. Gabriel, a three-quarter view, strong shadows over his face. He leans against a doorway, neither inside nor outside the room. He looks like he is about to ask a question. The question was “How long do I have to stand like this,” but she has left out the glint in his eyes, made him wearier. In his eye is the shadowed reflection of a woman. A girl. She calls itIntruder: A Self-Portrait. She worries it is too obvious, not obvious enough, pretentious, common.

She likes it.

She is notsatisfiedwith it, the way Lorelei cautions her against; her colors are muddy in places, the anatomy just off enough to bother her, the reflection of the girl not as distinct as she’d hoped.

Gabriel likes it, too. But he doesn’t like the title. “You’re not intruding on anything,” he’d said.

“Except your life,” she told him.

“Consider yourself an invited guest,” he said with his slantwise smile.

Their families hate each other. The details of it are murky to Emma. His father worked for hers until very recently. There were accusations of theft on one side, mismanagement on the other. But Kenneth Mahoney is a drunk and a deadbeat, and no one was surprised he’d gotten himself fired from another job.

“What is that?” a sharp voice asks.

She turns. Her mother stands in the doorway. She is dressed, as she nearly always is, as if she is about to walk out the door to a charity brunch at any second. Pearls at her neck and her nails shiny, perfect ovals, buffed and polished.

“It’s a portrait of Mrs. Mahoney’s grandson,” Emma says simply, as if this is completely neutral information.

“We’re painting portraits of boys now?” her mother asks in that same sharp tone.

Emma rolls her eyes. “It’s just a portrait, Mom. It’s not like I drew him in the nude.”

Her mother stiffens. “I hear you’ve been hanging around together.”

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