“But then what?”
“I just wanted to stop you. I just wanted to stay here,” Hannah whispered.
“Then what, Hannah?” Julia pleaded with her, her face wet with tears.
Hannah shook her head, closed her eyes. Her sister’s face in her memory, white in the blue light of the moon. Fae killed Ellie. I have proof. We aren’t safe here.
You ruin everything. You ruined Wyatt. You ruined Brackenhill. We were so happy, before. I can’t go back to Plymouth.
“You ruin everything. You’re still doing it,” Hannah moaned, the dirt hard beneath her knees when she sank down, resting her forehead against her forearms. Julia held tight to Hannah’s hands, swaying slightly. “Stop. Just stop ruining everything.”
Click, click. The snap of an old lock. Not rusted.
The key in her fingertips. A fleur-de-lis.
Oh my God.
Hannah wanted to crawl inside the dirt, bury herself. Make it stop, the pain, the emptiness, the missing.
She’d been so angry. Furious. She remembered everything suddenly, like a flash. The fury, the hurt. She’d been so tired.
What had she done?
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Then
August 2, 2002
“Julia, wait!” Hannah’s voice cut across the courtyard. The moon was bright, but Hannah had grabbed one of Stuart’s battery-powered lanterns from the kitchen. Julia turned, her duffel bag slung over her shoulder, and studied her sister.
Hannah was so tired. Her body was screaming for sleep, her legs heavy and back aching. And yet her heart raced and stuttered. Couldn’t find a rhythm.
“Where are you going?” she called after her. Julia turned away then, hefted her bag higher, and took off down the path toward town, legs pumping.
Hannah raced after her.
Julia, who had everything: Wyatt. Josh Fink. Secrets. Friends. Trina. She was going to ruin everything. For what? Because she wanted to? Everything Julia did was because she wanted to. Because she didn’t care who she hurt. How could she have not seen it before? Julia didn’t love Hannah. Julia loved Julia. She didn’t care who she stepped on as long as she got what she wanted. She wanted to leave Brackenhill? She’d make sure it happened. By going to the police? About what? What lies would she make up now?
Hannah was destined to live in her big sister’s shadow, forever falling short. The uglier one. The dumber one. The one that was ignored by her mother and preyed upon by her stepfather. She couldn’t go home to Plymouth. She would not be made to leave Brackenhill again.
Julia picked up speed.
Hannah had never been to this part of the forest at night. The path to town was steep and narrow, pebbled with rocks, and Hannah’s ankle rolled, her hip hitting a painful root. She leaned forward to massage it, her fingertips finding the tender spot below the bone. Her sister’s blonde hair in the distance was growing fainter; she could barely make her out. In a few seconds she’d be gone.
Hannah looked around and saw with astonishment that she’d tumbled right outside the embankment. From the path the embankment looked nondescript, the side crawling with dead blackberry vines, spindly and broken. Hannah knew what lay underneath the vines.
A door.
Slowly, as if in a trance, she touched the fleur-de-lis key in her pocket. And then she knew. She’d tried every door in Brackenhill but this one.
She stood, tentatively putting weight on her ankle. It seemed fine. She faked a limp.
“Julia!” she called after her sister, her voice breaking with the effort. The night was still. Bright. Clear. In the far distance, she heard the rush of the river, so faint, like the inside of a conch shell.
Julia stopped, turned. “Leave me alone, Hannah!” she yelled back, and Hannah felt the burn of fury in her gut. That bitch.
“I’m hurt!”
She retracted the key from her pocket and pulled the blackberry vines away from the opening. Just as she’d thought: a rough wooden door, once painted but now splintered and weathered.
The key fit perfectly in the old padlock. When the door swung open, she saw nothing but concrete steps down into blackness.
“Julia!” Hannah called again, the lantern casting dark shadows into the cavern.
So strange, thought Hannah, that I’m not afraid.
Hannah descended the steps, careful with her ankle, holding on to the wall. Julia’s face appeared above her from the opening, moon bright and shining.
“Hannah, what are you doing?”
“I’m hurt. I fell.” Hannah felt the half lie in her mouth, sweet and full. Would her sister worry? She might pretend to worry.
“Hannah, please.”
Hannah, please. Oh, a refrain from her childhood. Please go away. Please leave me alone. Please be quiet. Please stop talking. Please make yourself smaller. No, smaller. There, now you are invisible.
“I got the door open,” Hannah said from the center of the room. She swung the lantern out before setting it down in the middle of the floor: shelves, flour sacks, canning jars—some filled with brown liquid, most empty. A pile of burlap in the center of the room. A few glass jugs filled with water.
“Hannah, it’s not the right time for this. Please, I have to go.” Julia’s voice was quick, panicky.
“You don’t have to go. You choose to go.”
“You don’t understand anything!” Julia screamed, her face red with rage. “I just need you to leave me alone for five minutes. You don’t! You’re always after me. Do you know there are bigger things happening than you this summer?”
“Why would I know anything? You don’t talk to me. You haven’t talked to me in months.”
Julia panted, trying to catch her breath. She descended the concrete stairs, stepping carefully into the beam from Hannah’s lantern. Finally, she said, calmer, “Hannah, listen to me. She killed Ellie. Aunt Fae killed someone. Maybe more than one. We are not safe here. We are not safe with her.”
“That’s bullshit. Aunt Fae couldn’t kill anyone!”
Did Julia’s selfishness know no bounds? She’d accuse Aunt Fae of murder?
“You take everything from me.” Hannah covered her face, willed the tears to come, but her eyes stayed dry. She felt nothing: not fear, not sadness, just a blank emptiness deep inside where feelings should have been. Like she’d been flayed open, all her insides out for the world to see, and now she had nothing left.
Hannah didn’t recognize the girl in front of her: the tangled blonde hair, the flush of her cheeks, the sour smell of her. “I can’t go back to Plymouth. Do you understand? Do you know what he does to me?” Her voice cracked, the tip of an unpleasant feeling surfacing. Despair. Hannah tamped it down, stamped it out. “Did he do it to you?”
It was a big gun, Hannah knew. Her sister wilted, her face transformed, and Hannah had her answer. Not anymore. Julia didn’t have to say it.
Julia’s old silence was Hannah’s new burden.
Fuck that.
Julia took two steps forward and folded her sister in her arms. Hannah didn’t return the embrace, just waited. Counted to five. Breathed in and out. Bubbles of anger rising up, her throat on fire with it, her skin burning where Julia touched her. Julia, who had always sworn she’d protect her.
Hannah slipped out of the hug and bounded up the concrete steps two at a time.