“Yeah.” I laugh, hoping she won’t sense that I’m trying not to cry. “But they’re going to fix it.”
She closes her eyes for a long moment, and her body deflates with an exhausted sigh. “Moody?” she asks.
“Moody told me the truth,” I say. She’s white as a ghost, and I rub warmth into her cheeks with my thumbs. “That idiot confessed to everything.”
I don’t have to explain what I mean; Iris knows. When she’s well again, I’ll ask her why she took the fall for her first lover’s murder. Why she let me go on believing she was the one who started us on this path. But for now, all that matters is that she’s here with me. She’s the one sister that I can still protect.
“I was so—so mad at her,” Iris says. “She did it so we could be together.” She snorts. Look how that turned out.
Moody killed Iris’s lover. When I found Iris that night, her sobs weren’t of guilt or shock, but of true grief. The kind I feel when I think of losing Edison.
“Don’t hurt him,” Iris says, reading my thoughts. “You’d never forgive yourself.” She jabs her finger against my heart.You’re more like me than you realize,she told me only a few days ago.
I’m shocked by how liberating the words are, as though she’s just handed me a key. “I was afraid to tell you,” I say, my voice strained. “About Edison. I thought you’d call me weak.”
Her throat rattles when she lets out a feeble laugh. “Nothing takes more strength than loving someone. Especially for us.”
“Why did you go along with it?” I ask. “Why did you kill the others?”
She closes her eyes, and I think she’s falling asleep, but then I see a tear squeeze out from behind her lashes and roll down her cheek. “Because Moody was willing to kill for me. She loved me that much. I wanted to show that I loved both of you too.”
She can barely stay awake, but she fights it. I try not to let on how scared I am. I need to be strong for her. But the gentle tone and motherly touch were always Moody’s talent. Moody is impulsive and reckless when she’s out in the world, but with Iris and me she has always been practiced. Cunning and manipulative under her gentleness. Butthis morning, she finally let us go, and that’s how I know her love was never an act—even if so many other things were.
“Sis—”
“Rest,” I say, pleading. “I can’t save her, Iris, so you have to get well. It looks bad for you legally, but I can fix this.”
“Moody was scared that you’d run off with him and we’d lose you,” Iris says. “But I told her that would never happen because you love us way more than you should.”
What would have happened once I decided to let Edison live? I would have spent one final night with him and tiptoed out while he slept. I’d have retreated to my sisters in shame, begged them to forgive me. I would make it up to them, vow to clean all their messes until we’re in our nineties, do anything they asked. Anything but kill the man I love.
Iris is right. I would have abandoned Edison, not them.
Iris sees the conflict in my face and she curls her fingers around mine. “It’s time to stop cleaning our messes, Sissy. Let go. You’re too good for us.”
Tears, traitorous and heavy, fill my eyes. Iris never spoke of the horrors she endured in her group homes and foster placements, but as the years went on, I saw the hardness that she cultivated just so that she’d survive. She pushed Moody and me to be strong, to be ruthless, so that nobody could ever hurt us. It was the only way she could protect us.
I still remember the child she was. I remember all the times she saved my life just by loving me. “You’re good too,” I say.
“No.” She says this with her familiar stubborn certainty. “Maybe once. But not anymore.”
I don’t have words for how much I need her, and so I say nothingwhen she squeezes my hand. I’m not going to fly out of Arizona and leave her and Moody here, no matter what they say. If Colin’s attorney can’t keep Iris out of prison, I’ll find her a better one. I’ll deplete our life savings if I have to.
But I’ve never had to say a word around Iris. She fixes me with her usual scrutiny, and she can read every thought in my head. She can see the future that I’m laying out for us. A fresh start. Someplace we’ve never been, with four full seasons. Lush white blizzards in the winter and bright colors in the fall. When the baby comes, she can help me raise it, the start of a brand-new trio. We’ll be better people this time, like who we might have been if we’d had a better start. Iris smiles at me, and it fills her weary eyes up with life again.
Then her hand goes slack in mine, and her head lolls to one side. “Iris?” I hear the alarm in my voice before my panic reaches the rest of me. Her eyes fix, pupils dilated, and even before she shudders, I know that something is wrong. I’m already screaming for the nurses by the time the beeping on the heart monitor turns frantic.
When the first nurse rushes into the room, she tries to pry my hand out of Iris’s, but I don’t let go. Not Iris. She’s the only one I have left.
“Iris, please.” I say the words too softly for anyone to hear, but I will them into her. I beg her to hear, to fight her way back to me. Her eyes roll up, revealing a glazed white. Her lashes flutter and her shaking turns violent. The veins in her neck bulge. Her skin turns an angry, strained red, like her lovers when she tightened the garrote. She makes a choked sound, a pitched whine that she would never make if she were conscious because it sounds too much like a plea.
The human body is intricate and complicated. There are a thousand things that can go wrong after a surgery. A blood clot the size of a grain of rice could travel to the brain, the lungs, the heart. Distantly,I’m aware that there are more hands prying me away. I hold on the way I did when we were small; I fight the way that she did that awful first time we were torn apart. She bit, scratched, kicked like a child possessed, because she loved us. “Samantha!” The nurses call her by the name she abandoned years ago. “Come on, Samantha,” and “Stay with us, Sam.”
I don’t struggle anymore when they shove me into the hallway. I don’t cry out for her, because I know that she can feel me just as surely as I feel her in this moment, all fight and chaos. With my back against the wall, I can still see her through the open door. Iris, the most powerful, the strongest of us all. Her wrist is cuffed to the metal railing of the bed, and her body jolts from their efforts to bring her back. The monitor screams, and the sound turns long and flat and unchanging. Her muscles go limp. Her skin is pale like the sharp glint of a blade in the moonlight.
They’re trying valiantly to bring her back, but I feel how futile it is. There’s a pull as a third of my heart is ripped away. All of her life flashes through me—angry and beautiful and full of hope; what was, what could have been—fast and bright like a train through a tunnel.
“Stay,” I sob. “Please stay.”
