Daisy’s hand covers her mouth as she stares at the phone in her hand. Her face is pale. “Margaret called.” Daisy is never one to scare easily, and the fear in her eyes as she looks up at me sends a chill down my spine.
“What is it?” I ask again, more urgently. Margaret is Naomi’s guardian, a no-nonsense Englishwoman to whom I’ve grown close over the years. I talked to her this morning. She knows we’re here. Why would she be calling this late? What could be so important that she called Daisy when she couldn’t reach me?
Daisy grabs my arm and pulls me away from the crowd. Her breathing is uneven, and she’s on the verge of tears.
I glance back, keeping an eye on our girls as panic flares across my chest. Something is definitely wrong.
“It’s Naomi,” Daisy says in a choked whisper. “She’s—” She can’t seem to get out the rest.
“What about Naomi?”Is she sick? Hurt?
“Oh, Maya, I’m so sorry.” She starts to wrap her arms around me, but I pull back, shaking my head, a horrible feeling growing in the pit of my stomach.
“Is she okay? What happened?”
Daisy shakes her head, hesitates, and somehow I know what she’s going to say before the words leave her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Maya. Naomi’s dead. She’s gone, I’m so sorry.”
Chapter Two
Maya
May 2023
When we get to thepolice station, I lean out the door and dry heave onto the pavement. It feels like my body is made of lead as I follow Nate across the parking lot and up the steps of the building. How could this happen? I was supposed to protect her. I promised her I would protect her.
“Maya!” In the waiting area, Margaret sobs into a tissue. The woman who raised Naomi, loved her, baked her a raspberry cake every birthday. The woman whom I once saw pull a bee stinger from Naomi’s pinky toe and another time, rush her to the hospital when she fell off her bike and chipped a tooth. The woman who always made me feel like I wasn’t alone in looking after my sister.
When she sees me, she leaps out of the chair and runs over, short black hair a stark contrast to her pale, tear-stained face. “Thank God you’re here.” She pulls me into her arms. “I don’t understand. How could this happen…Why…” Her words spiral off as she chokes on her tears.
“Did they tell you anything more?” I ask. It still doesn’t feel real. Somehow I half expected to see Naomi here, too, even after what Daisy had told me.
Margaret says something about drowning. Lake Carnegie. Suddenly I remember the text alert on my phone and realize it must have been closed so the police could retrieve Naomi’s body. A wave of nausea passes over me as suddenly it all feels very real.
“But what was she doing by the lake?” I ask, more to myself than to her, just trying to understand.
Margaret looks at me, eyes filled with tears. “I spoke with the detective, but she wouldn’t tell me much. They plan to do an autopsy.”
Now my tears come. I squeeze my eyes shut and let her hold me as they spill from my eyes.
I remember when Naomi was born, the moment I first saw her in our mother’s arms when she came home from the hospital. And when it was my turn to hold her, the unexpected lightness of her. The smoothness of her skin, softer than anything I’d felt. Her milky baby scent and tiny fingers curling around my pinky for the first time, nails like rice paper, barely formed.
Some mothers say the love for their child is more intense than anything else, and now that I’m a mother, I understand what they mean. But the moment I held my baby sister, I felt that same innate feeling rise up in me. I loved her more than anyone on this earth and I wanted to keep her safe.
There’s a widening gash inside me now as if a knife were tearing me apart, flaying strips from my heart. It was my job to protect her. And I’d failed.
“Maya Banks?” I look up to see a stern-looking female detective with a sturdy frame and a slick low ponytail.
My eyes run warily from her jacket to the gun at her waistband, but I try my best to remember she is on my side. “Yes.”
“Detective Simmons. I’ve been assigned to your case.” She holds out a hand for me to shake and I’m struck by the strange formality. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I stare back, unable to respond. The most I can manage is a small nod.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about your sister.”
I glance back at my husband, Nate, who is standing with his broad shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, clearly uncomfortable to be the only Black man waiting in the lobby surrounded by white officers, but he nods.
—
