In the silence of the empty apartment, I’ve had plenty of time to think about Edison’s murder. I would have climbed on top of him in the heat of passion. I would have looked into his eyes and seen the vulnerable, wild love he shows me only when we’re alone.
And I wouldn’t have been able to do it.
I love my sisters. I would walk into a fire for them. I have cleaned all their messes. But when I was finally tested, I discovered that I wouldn’t kill for them. That I have never wanted to do anything butprotect them, even as it slowly killed any promise of finding happiness for myself.
When Colin’s flight touches down, he takes a cab to my apartment and finds me curled up on the couch. I’m spent from hours of sobbing. For my sisters. For Edison. For all those years of living a lie, and the violent, bloody relief of letting those false identities go.
Colin comes to me the way that I always did for him: without judgment, without anger. As a friend—no, a brother. He kneels beside the couch and peels the blanket away from my face. “You’re looking rough, kiddo,” he says, and I snort with an unexpected laugh.
“I’m so fucking glad to see you,” I tell him.
“Been a while, hasn’t it?” he says. “I read the news on the plane. Kidnapping doesn’t really sound like your idea of a hobby.”
Even though his tone is light, I catch his meaning. He flew all this way to help me, and he can’t do that unless I tell him what’s going on. So much of our friendship has depended on not asking too many questions. I didn’t ask where he’d been all night when he snuck back into the house at three o’clock in the morning. He didn’t ask me why I needed so many fake IDs, or why I never told him where I was going when I left the state for a year at a time.
I brew two cups of tea before I settle in to tell him the story. “Sorry. It’s all we have,” I say. “There’s no coffee.”
“I quit coffee,” he says. “Caffeine was making me too jumpy. I’m trying to cleanse.” He says it with a flourish, like he’s trying to make me laugh.
“I’m proud of you,” I say. “At least one of us is holding it together.”
“What are you doing in this dump?” When he talks, he calls me by the name I never use; the one I left behind when my sisters and I first fled California. Every time I hear that name, I replay some lostimage from my past. Being shouted at by someone in a group home. Writing it on my drawings with red crayon. Hearing it murmured by my first boyfriend just before he kissed me. There was a time when I felt some connection to it, but now it’s like a ghost. “Where have you been on and off for the past six years?”
In this moment, I wish that my foster brother wasn’t in recovery and I wasn’t pregnant, because this would be so much easier if we were both drunk.
I start with Iris’s boyfriend. The skewer in the back, the pieces of his body still submerged in the San Joaquin. Our pact I made with my sisters, only I call them by the names he’s familiar with. I tell him about the mark I couldn’t kill, and so Iris did it for me. The gallons of peroxide. The fake identities.
Last, I tell him about Edison. The way I tried to be like my sisters, only to realize that all that passion and that painful longing were love. Just plain love.
Colin sits like a statue through all of it, not betraying even a flinch. His mug is empty by the time I’m through, and my own tea has gone cold in my hands.
He looks down at his mug and then at me. “Why didn’t you call me?” he says. “That first time, with the guidance counselor boyfriend. I would have helped.”
“You would have called the police,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I would have gotten you out of there.”
A fierce protectiveness rises in me at the thought. I belong with them.
Even though I don’t say this, Colin sees the change in my expression. His tone shifts, like I’m the little foster child I was when we met. “You have never been like them. You tried, and you’re still trying. But you’re just not.”
“You don’t know them like I do,” I say. “They’re my family. They would do anything for me.”
“That theory is about to be tested,” Colin says. “They’re both in hot water right now, and they could strike a plea deal if they throw you under the bus and help police solve those cold cases you cleaned up for them.”
I want to argue that my sisters won’t do this, but I can’t be certain. Before this morning, I wouldn’t have ever thought my sisters would kidnap an innocent child just to test my loyalty. I wouldn’t have thought I would fail, or that I’d still feel so certain I’d made the right decision—even as one of them sits in jail and the other in the hospital.
“You won’t tell your attorney about any of this, right?” I ask.
“Of course not,” Colin says. “He’s waiting for my call. He’ll fly out whenever you say the word.”
“I need to talk to my sisters before I do anything,” I say. I called the hospital the second I was released from jail; they handed me my burner phone in a brown paper bag, and it was the only one I had after giving Sadie my smartphone. All the nurse could tell me was that a patient with my sister’s name had been admitted, and if I wanted to know more I would have to speak to the doctor in person. I asked three different times if she was alive, if she wassure, until she finally lost patience and hung up.
Colin doesn’t say anything, but I can feel his exasperation. He takes the mug from my hands and brings it to the kitchen sink. He can’t understand this feeling—no matter what my sisters have done, they’re a part of me. If they had run off to New Mexico, or Iowa, or Canada, two sharp identical pieces of my own self would be missing.
The car that my sisters and I were sharing is gone, likely evidence in the ongoing investigation. I’m not worried about it. They won’t find anything damning. Covering our tracks is what I do.
Once I was sure the police were done combing Dara’s apartment, I snuck into the laundry room. I put her money in the front pocket of a hoodie with the name of her brother’s college on it. I know that he’ll find it when her family comes to collect her things, and she would want him to have it.
