She returns to the living room and finds her sister curled beneath a throw, her own cup cooling on the coffee table in front of her. A photo album lies open across her lap.
Tessa hesitates, but Margot doesn’t immediately ask her to leave, so she walks slowly into the room.
“Mind if I join you?” she asks.
“It’s a free country.” Margot doesn’t look up from the album and turns another thick page. The riotous curls Margot despaired of as a girl, no matter how many times Tessa said she’d trade her in a heartbeat, fall like a curtain between them, hiding her sister’s face.
Tessa sits on the opposite end of the sofa and nurses her tea. Thoughts swirl, but every subject she touches on is out of bounds.
She and Ben will work it out, she tells herself. They have to. It will be easier once I’m gone.
Whether that’s true or not, it’s the best she’s got, and Tessa clings to that.
“Do you remember this place?” Margot asks, gesturing to a crooked shot of Jane. It’s an opening, and Tessa leans in to take a closer look. There’s an old house in the background, looking abandoned and forlorn. She struggles to recall the circumstances of the photo.
“Was that after Granddad’s funeral?” Margot asks.
Tessa shrugs and shakes her head. It’s been a long time.
“It was,” Margot insists. “We stopped here on the drive home, remember? Some historic site Mom wanted to see.”
“Maybe,” Tessa says. “Look at her face. God, it must have been rough, losing both her parents and Dad, all within a few years. She’s not much older there than we are now.”
“Life comes at you hard sometimes,” Margot says, shifting away from Tessa. And with those words, they slip back into dangerous territory.
Tessa flashes onto the many phone calls from her mother, updates on how Margot was progressing through her recovery. The surgeries, the grueling physical therapy.
The intense desire to be by her sister’s side while Margot was fighting to walk again feels like it was only yesterday. Along with the knowledge that she was the last person Margot wanted to see.
Instead, Tessa threw herself into film school. She turned down invitations to parties and avoided making friends, drunk on the guilt of her twin battling her way back onto her feet, while she was blithely walking to class.
She cried when Jane called to tell her Margot had taken her first steps, twenty-one months and eight days after that terrible night.
She cried again, two years later, when Jane haltingly told Tessa that Margot and Ben were engaged to be married.
“He’s been by her side the whole time,” Jane said, partly as an explanation, part apology. “I didn’t want to bring it up before. I know how much you cared about him, but someone has to tell you.”
“That’s wonderful, Mom,” Tessa had said through tears she tried to hide. “I’m happy for them.”
But was she?
Before Tessa left town, on that last and final day, she’d gone to see Ben. Their meeting was short.
NYU wasn’t a complete shock. Tessa had planned for many months to attend for the upcoming fall semester with the understanding that she and Ben would continue their relationship long distance, at least until he could join her.
Margot’s accident had changed everything. There was no more talk of Tessa leaving.
But then, things changed again. Tessa removed the promise ring Ben had given her on her sixteenth birthday, the one she’d worn every day since, and laid it gently in his hand.
She would never forget the hurt on his face.
A clean break. As if such a thing exists.
She didn’t have the strength to explain why. If he believed she was a monster for abandoning Margot, for abandoning him, there was nothing she could do about that.
“Please, Ben,” she asked quietly. “Please, just be there for my sister while I can’t.”
Her voice cracked and she left before he could protest any more.
It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and Tessa didn’t regret it . . . but engaged? The news was a shock, to say the least.
The joining in her mind of two separate, damaged bundles of nerve endings that she carried with her everywhere sparked and sizzled as they fused, leaving a new connection. Strong, but tender to the touch.
She forced her mouth to form the words. Margot. And. Ben. Margot and Ben.
Once the pain faded, Tessa was overcome with . . . wonderment.
She was happy for them. She was.
And now she’s selfishly put it all at risk. She glances toward her sister’s face, bathed in lamplight as Margot studies the photo album in her lap.
“Margot, I—”
“It wasn’t her,” Margot says before Tessa has a chance to finish the thought.
Tessa stops and stares at her sister, confused, as Margot closes the album and leans to place it on the coffee table.
“Valerie Winters,” she explains when she sees Tessa’s face. “It wasn’t her in the shed on the Barlow property. It was Oliver Barlow’s father.”
“What?” Tessa struggles to understand.
“The news broke while you were sleeping. They haven’t released the cause of death.”
Tessa remembers the small man who couldn’t stop crying when his son was released from prison. The way he’d slumped, silent and bereft, during his wife’s funeral. “But that means . . .” She trails off, glancing at her sister.
“That means Valerie’s body is still out there. Somewhere. And so is Oliver Barlow,” Margot finishes for her. “It means this isn’t over yet.”
12
KITTY
“This isn’t over yet! Come back here this instant!”
Kitty moans softly in her sleep, eyes squeezed tight as her limbs move restlessly beneath the sheets.
The voice, one part dream, two parts memory, holds her tightly in its clutches.
Helena Cooke is angry. Again.
Not that she doesn’t have cause to be. That cause, as usual, comes careening around the corner into the kitchen. Cora.
The cup Deirdre is raising to her mouth stalls, splashing orange juice on the front of her dress.
Deirdre is closest to Cora in age. Raised in one another’s pockets, they formed a friendship that flies in the face of the difference in their stations. But a stranger would be hard-pressed to determine which child is the daughter of the house and which the daughter of the housekeeper, as Cora is generally filthy.
Today, the stink precedes her entrance into the kitchen. Saoirse Donnelly, or Mam, as the children call her, is the housekeeper and closest thing to a mother the Cooke children have known since the death of their own. She wrinkles her nose in Cora’s direction.
“Ach, just look at you, you grimy thing.” She slaps Cora’s hand as she reaches for a biscuit in the center of the table. “What have you done now?” The words are delivered in a cloud of frustration but lined with care.
Cora shrugs, stuffing her mouth full of biscuit she swiped from Peter’s breakfast plate instead.
Sharp, quick footsteps follow overhead, then down the staircase. Mam waves her arms and ushers all of them from the room.
“Not you,” she says, grabbing Cora by the collar as she tries to sneak past. “May as well face up to whatever this is now rather than later. Sit down. Ach, just look at you, child. You weren’t half so dirty when you were off to bed, lass. How is it possible to get filthier in your sleep?”