Page 12 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“A bitch. Always trying to win points with Dad, even if it means throwing me under the bus. Like, I had a boyfriend for a little while, and she ratted me out to Dad just so she could look like thegooddaughter and I could look like a little slut.”

She wants me to chime in with my own anti-Harmony slander, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I still think of Harmony as a headstrong preteen desperate to discover who she is and carve out her place in the world. I shift in my seat to keep the leather from adhering to my bare legs. “Do you want to ask me about what I did?”

“Why Mom and not Dad?”

Mom. Dad.The warm names sicken me. “It was supposed to be Dad. Just didn’t happen that way.”

I wait for Grace to press for details, but she stares out the window, past the chokecherry tree and the burnt house. Her curtailed curiosity feels like a rebuff, punishment for a wrong answer I had no choice but to give. The end of her cigarette glows orange as she inhales.

“I miss her,” Grace says.

“Do you think she’ll come home?”

She scolds my naïvete with an eye roll. “I listen to true crime podcasts all the time, and they say if someone goes missing andisn’t found within three days, they’re dead.” She mimes dragging a blade across her throat, lolling out her tongue like a dehydrated animal, but even the comic charade cannot mask the sadness in her eyes. “Today is day three.”

“The turnout was good at both searches. Maybe that’s a reason to be hopeful.”

“They don’t really want to find her. Everyone thinks of it as a fun little story they get to be part of—ooh, a local mystery, how exciting!” She bleeds sarcasm. “No one really cares what happened to her except me and Harmony.”

“I care.”

Grace takes another drag. “I don’t think you’re very different from anyone else who showed up.”

“She’s my mother too.”

“Yeah, but you tried to kill her. I mean, you wanted her to die. What difference does it make to you if she’s gone forever?”

Every response I come up with is robed in hypocrisy.I’ve changed.I don’t know if I have.I regret it.I don’t know if I do.It does make a difference.I don’t know if it does. “I didn’t have to disrupt my entire life to come out here, Grace. She hasn’t talked to me in almost ten years. Last time she saw me, she told me she wouldn’t care if I dropped dead. I never loved her, and I don’t think she ever loved me, but I don’t want her story to end this way. It matters to me that we find out what happened to her.”

I can’t tell her my suspicion about our father. That motive makes me a reptile. I will live up to every diabolical assumption she has about me and I will never come back from it. She will write me off as a would-be killer, exactly the evil creature she was warned about.

“Closure is a lie,” she says.

Spoken like a teenager. “One day you’ll need it too.”

She rests her head against the window and gazes at the chokecherry tree. Its branches dip from the weight of their fruit.Our mother would be harvesting them for her famous pie if she was here.

Cigarette still in her mouth, Grace smiles at me. I choose to see it as an assurance she still does not hate me. “Will you take me home now? I’m tired.”

We stub out our cigarettes and I take her back to Cedar Street. Every light is out, a lucky peculiarity given my father’s erratic sleep schedule. The stillness of the house relieves Grace, who cannot help but sigh at the stroke of good fortune. I want to ask if he still prowls around the house in the middle of the night, if our bedrooms still have no doors, if the floorboard outside my old room is still silent beneath his step, but I’m afraid she’ll say yes.

Her hand is on the door. “Before you go, Grace—how did you get my number?”

“Mom gave it to me a few weeks ago,” she says. “In case of emergency.”

CHAPTER

5

August 11th

9:46AM

THENEXT MORNING,I wake to the smell of coffee and bacon. Sara’s hospitality is not for me, however. It’s for Daniel, who sits at the dining room table in his policeman’s uniform, playing tug-of-war with Augustus. The gun on his hip reminds me of my own, which I now have stored in the glove compartment of my car instead of my purse. The last thing I want is for someone to find my gun in Sara’s trailer. If I get caught with it, I don’t want to take her down with me.

“Glad you finally decided to join us, Sleeping Beauty.” Sara stands an arm’s length away from the sizzling bacon. She flinches each time she flips a slice, as if she’s cutting wires to defuse a bomb. The other two dogs sit raptly beside her. “Daniel, my guest of honor has arrived.”

“We met yesterday.” Daniel gives me an appraising look, unable to hide his distaste for me still being in my pajamas. I think his antipathy is reserved for me, but when he glances to hissister, his churlish expression remains unchanged. He is a cut above us both.

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