Page 40 of No One Can Know

“Throw these out,” he instructs.

She takes the scraps from him. Her hands are trembling. There’s a lump in her throat that makes swallowing painful, and her vision blurs, but she doesn’t cry. She looks down at the scraps of paper in her hands. Useless now. She’ll have to start again.

She can’t start again.

“Fuck you,” she says.

“Emma,” her mother hisses, and something in her tone makes Emma actually think for a moment she might be concerned for Emma’s well-being—but this only lends a kind of comedy to the situation, and Emma bares her teeth.

“Fuck. You,” she says again, the worst insult she can muster, fangless and ineffectual. She throws the stack of ruined work at her father, paper fluttering to the ground as he stands impassively, and she runs.

Her mother calls after her, but her father says “Let her go,” and then Emma is at the door, shoving her feet into shoes, running out. He’s letting her go because he knows and she knows that she will have to come back, and when she does, the punishment will be far worse than if she’d stayed.

She stops in the drive. If she turns back now, it might not be so bad. But the worst that can happen already has. Her work, her way out, is ruined. There’s no way she can rebuild the portfolio in time, not one good enough for UCLA, for anywhere. And they won’t let her go.

She can’t be here, in this house, with these people. She starts moving again, walking swiftly with her arms wrapped around her and her eye throbbing in time with the beating of her heart.

As she makes her way down the road, she allows herself, at last, to cry.

19EMMA

Now

When Emma arrived home, the neighbor across the street was mowing his lawn. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he was watching her as she got out to open the gate. She wished she were the kind of person to stare right back or flip him off. She kept her head down instead. She grabbed the bag that rested in the passenger seat—cameras from the electronics store, which she’d figured she’d pick up and spare Nathan the trip—and hurried inside without making eye contact.

Nathan was in the kitchen, taking a Brillo pad to the stove. She dropped the bag of cameras on the table, but he didn’t turn.

“I got some cameras. They’re the brand you wanted. They were pretty expensive—I only ended up getting two, but that’s front and back, at least,” she said.

“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to go into town,” he said, not turning. The bottle of white wine sat on the counter, half-empty. He must have retrieved it from the trash.

“I know. But I had a bit of cabin fever and I thought since you were so tired—” she began. He turned, eyes flashing with anger.

“If you were doing me a favor, why did you wait until I was asleep? Sneak out when I was taking a nap?” he demanded. She flinched, shying away from him. He made a disgusted sound. He hated it whenshe flinched. He’d never once raised a hand to her. Acting like she was afraid of him was insulting.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to argue about it.”

“Which means you knew it would piss me off and you did it anyway,” he said.

“I can’t be a prisoner in this house, Nathan,” Emma protested.

“A prisoner? You’re being way overdramatic,” Nathan said.

“I just mean—”

“You’re trying to turn it around and make me the bad guy. But you’re the one lying and sneaking around,” Nathan said, jabbing a finger at her.

“I’m not—”

“You didn’t just go to the store,” Nathan said. He crossed his arms. “Did you?”

“You tracked my phone,” she said evenly.

“Can you blame me? I woke up and you weren’t here.”

“I sent you a text. I left a note,” Emma said. She glanced over; the note was in the trash. He had found it, then.

“We’re being harassed. I didn’t know where you were. Whether you were safe. And apparently I was right to be worried, because you weren’t where you said you were going to be.”

---