Please, the next text from Josie read, the phone buzzing in Priya’s hand. Something’s changed, and I need to explain.
Priya’s mind drifted back to Brad. Was that even a real thing for him, his inability to make her okay? Or was she just worrying again, her anxiety always ready to rev like an engine and sweep her away?
Can you meet with me? asked Josie, and Priya reached into her bag for her medication, her heart pounding. Could it ever not be this way, with Priya terrified every time she heard her phone chime? Josie’s texts only came through every six months or so. Once, a full two years went by without one, and Priya had felt safe for the first time in forever. She knew she could change her number, but what if that enraged Josie and made her do something unsavory with everything she knew?
Priya opened the yellow bottle and removed a pill with shaking fingers. She popped it onto her tongue and swigged it down with a gulp of tepid tap water. She couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to never, ever again hear from Josie Carmichael.
THREE
Haley
An hour after anatomy class ended, Haley sat inside her parked car with an indie rock station blaring. She stared at the new coffee shop on Main Street. All she wanted to do was head to the police station, but the appointment wasn’t for another hour. Through the coffee shop’s windows, she saw the profiles of her blond, beautiful real estate agents, Josie and Noah Carmichael. They were seated inside at a circular table.
You want this, Haley, don’t you? You want a future with Dean in Waverly, so just go in, please, and try to act normal.
Josie was frowning at something Noah was saying, but then a man stopped at their table, and her expression changed. She tilted her chin and laughed as she stood to greet the person, maybe someone she once sold a home to. Noah stood, too, straightening to his full six feet, three or four inches, and extending a hand. He had a jawbone like an action figure.
It was 1:03, and Haley really needed to turn off her car and go inside, but she just couldn’t yet. Facing them today felt insurmountable. Josie and Noah had been Emma’s best friends back at Yarrow, and in the days after she disappeared, they seemed to have been her only friends, or at least the only ones who came forward with any information to try to help find her, turning over their phones immediately and leading the police to the journals Emma kept. Josie’s brother, Chris, was on record saying something like Anything could have happened to that girl, as if disappearing were somehow Emma’s fault, and the other students at Yarrow seemed to simultaneously obsess over Emma’s disappearance while also distancing themselves from her. There were dozens of students at the party with Emma when she disappeared, but their statements to the police were unhelpful, mostly peppered with observations about how Emma was aloof, and how she and Josie were so insular that it was hard to get to know either of them. It niggled at the edges of Haley’s mind, mostly because no one ever would have described Emma as aloof before college. She’d been incredibly well liked growing up in Waverly, voted homecoming queen her senior year of high school, which she mostly made fun of with self-effacing jokes, but still: it didn’t make sense for her personality to have undergone such a transformation, and Haley had never been able to put her finger on what had caused it.
Anything could have happened to that girl.
It made Haley shudder. And now Noah and Josie were ten years older, married, and running a real estate business in town. Emma had loved them so much, which is why Haley tried to love them, too, but it was weird seeing them and being forced to interact. All Haley could do was picture Noah, Josie, and Emma ten years ago lounging on the quad at Yarrow, Emma and Josie wearing cut-off shorts and Noah in his lacrosse jersey. Dean had done his undergrad at Yarrow, too, and though he hadn’t been friendly with Emma, Noah, or Josie during his years there, he was acquainted with them, and all these things put together meant it would be a snub not to use them as real estate agents. It’s a small town, Haley, Dean had said when he dialed Noah and Josie’s number, let’s not start off on the wrong foot. Dean cared about things like that, about making a good impression.
Haley turned up the music even louder, letting her eyes settle on the coffee shop’s blue neon sign: MOSAIC. She was pretty sure the owners were going for something swanky that looked different from all the other shops that lined the classic-looking Main Street, but it looked too futuristic, and it put a hard pit in her stomach, which made no sense when her future was supposed to look so bright, so safe. Just last night Haley and Dean had scrolled through wedding save-the-date cards and laughed about the pictures they could use to populate the blank spaces left for personalized photos. Anyway, what’s the point of these save-the-dates? Haley had blurted when Dean opened up an option with cherry blossoms scattered along the borders. If someone isn’t close enough to know when we’re planning the wedding, do we really care if they come?
Dean had bristled, jiggling the computer mouse back and forth. But really, Haley had been thinking about Emma and feeling righteously pissed that her sister wouldn’t be there when Dean’s random, double-cheek-kissing aunts would. Still, maybe what she’d said had been too harsh. Dean had accused her of that before.
Haley loved Dean, she really did. He was the only man who’d ever truly understood her, definitely the only man who’d ever loved her in the way she wanted to be loved. She was still adjusting to being engaged at twenty-six when none of her friends from Stanford were, and when the guys she’d dated there were still binge drinking and pulling all-nighters at work. She’d never been the type of person who fantasized about a someday wedding; when she was little she never even sent her Barbies on dates, only to surgery, and when her mother found them all cut up, she got freaked out and threw them away.
Haley turned off the radio, exhaled. It was now or never. She opened the car door, got out, and slammed it shut. Everything sounded louder in this kind of cold.
Haley started toward the coffee shop and zipped her black bomber jacket higher. She was careful on the icy pavement, her mind flashing to her cadaver again. She could see Susie’s still body lying on that table. Susie, like Emma, entered her mind uninvited all the time; Haley couldn’t seem to stop either of them. Thinking about them—and about whatever peril they’d somehow gotten themselves into—kept her sharp.
There was a thin line of scar tissue that ran along Susie’s forehead into her hairline, and Haley was always coming up with ways she could have gotten it. (A fall on black ice? A sibling who played too roughly?) In Haley’s dreams—the ones she was pretty sure most people would call nightmares—Emma came often and always with new maladies that she needed Haley to fix. Sometimes when Haley was between sleep and wakefulness, Emma sat on the edge of her bed. Sister, she always said, followed by things like help me . . . look closer . . . figure me out, but Haley wasn’t sure if Emma meant she was supposed to figure everything out now, or if she was talking about ten years ago. Of all the ways her sister haunted her, it was the images of how Emma could have died that Haley hated the most. She felt certain that her sister had fallen through the night sky: she could practically see it, hear it, and even smell the crisp winter air scented with evergreens. Sometimes—though she’d never admitted this to anyone—she felt Emma reverberating through her own body like the aftermath of a slap, like the ghost of her sister lived inside her and wanted the truth known.