Page 9 of No One Can Know

“Look. You can see his brain.” A finger reaching toward the hole, smacked away.

She lets the shudder that she has been holding back ripple over her shoulders and pulls her knees to her chest. She likes to imagine that she can fold herself in half and in half again, over and over until she is a tiny speck drifting. Until she is nothing at all.

“And that’s when Emma called 911?” Ellis asks.

“Maybe not right away?” she ventures.

“Take your time,” he reminds her.

Daphne swallows, nods. “Juliette was freaking out. Emma was trying to calm her down. So not right away.”

“You weren’t freaking out?” he asks, eyebrows raising.

“Of course I was,” she says quickly. Too quickly. She sees the momentary softness hardening again. She doesn’t know how to act. What to say. What does a normal person do, when they find their parents dead? When they see bits of their father’s brain on the rug? She has no idea. She feels like an alien, every word and inflection skewed and wrong.

“So then you called 911,” Ellis says.

“Emma did.”

“That’s right. Emma called 911.” A nod. “And we pretty much know the story after that, don’t we?”

She doesn’t like that he calls it a story.

Ellis shifts a bit. His fingertips rest against the table. She looks over at the bag, inhaling the grease smell. He hasn’t said she can’t have it. He hasn’t said she can. He notices her looking, and his hand flattens against the table.

“Daphne, let’s go back a moment.” He uses her name a lot, she thinks. Like he wants it to sound like he knows her. “Now, you and your sisters spent the night in the tree house. And you didn’t hear anything from the house? Gunshots?”

“I don’t think so?” she says. “I woke up a few times, but I don’t remember it being because of a noise.”

“And you were up there all night. All three of you,” Hadley says intently, staring straight at her.

“Like I told you,” Daphne says, and can’t suppress the irritated snap to her words.

Ellis sighs. “That is what you told us,” he concedes. “But, Daphne, we know that isn’t true.”

4DAPHNE

Now

Emma was going back to the house.

Daphne sat on the porch, a crocheted blanket around her shoulders, and watched a barn cat stalk purposefully across the yard. She liked this time of day. That liminal space between the end of work and the start of sleep, the few minutes when obligation eased enough to steal a moment to herself. A moment to take a breath.

In a way, the last fourteen years had been an in-between time like this. A rest. But if Emma was going back to the house, surely that couldn’t last.

“Daphne?”

The screen door creaked open, and Jenny leaned out, her dark hair slipping free of its messy bun to fall around her face. “He’s asleep. If you want to take off now, I can handle things.”

“Are you sure? He’ll need his meds in an hour,” Daphne said.

“I know the drill,” Jenny assured her. If it had been one of Dale’s other two children, she wouldn’t have considered leaving. Lisa always got flustered and worried she’d misread the dosage or mixed up the medications, and Drew wouldn’t have offered in the first place, was rarely here despite living only twenty minutes away.

“I wouldn’t mind an evening to myself,” Daphne admitted.

“You’ve certainly earned it. You’ve been such a godsend,” Jenny said. “Dad just adores you.”

“He’s a wonderful man,” Daphne replied warmly, though she didn’t have much of an opinion about him. She knew it was terrible, but she never really cared to get to know her clients. She worked better thinking of them not as people but as a series of problems to solve. It wasn’t to say that she was cold toward them—after all, emotional needs were another part of the puzzle. Being kind, listening, offering the gentle chiding voice or the joke to brighten their mood, it was all part of the work. She liked to be good at things.

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