Chapter 8
Millie
Ethan hunches over in the passenger seat of his jeep, his head resting in his hands as Lucy drives us to the police station.
From my place in the back seat, I watch her reach for him, flutter her fingertips from his his neck to his thigh like she’s trying to find a landing place.
Every few moments he lets out a sob, then a whimper, and Lucy clucks her tongue.
Her eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror, and she shakes her head to the right once.
I’m scared. I lift my left hand to my right ear. I love you.
This silent communication comes naturally to us, an unspoken language Lucy and I developed when we were little, before Frankie could talk or walk or do anything more interesting than coo and wrinkle her nose as she fussed in her bouncer.
When she turned six and could finally understand that we were speaking without her—raising our hands to our hair, twitching our mouths in specific directions, looking up at the sky for two seconds exactly—Frankie threw a fit, nearly kicking a hole through Lucy’s bedroom door.
Lucy rolled her eyes and called Frankie dramatic, but I couldn’t bear to see Frankie like that. Instead, I led her into my bedroom, and we sat on my shag carpet until she calmed down.
“Why don’t you include me?” she asked, her voice warbling.
Even with Frankie crying in front of me, I didn’t want to tell her that I hoped by keeping this secret between us, it meant Lucy loved me most of all.
Being older meant being wiser and cooler and smarter and braver.
As the youngest, Frankie was malleable and easy to influence, a little doll that I could protect and fawn over but not someone I could learn from or treasure in the same exact way.
But if I felt that way about Lucy—like she hung the moon, the stars, the sky—there was a chance Frankie felt that way about both of her older sisters, one of whom was me.
“It’s important for sisters to have secrets with each other.” I stood up and walked to my desk, pulling out a small pad of purple paper and a pen.
“But it makes me feel bad,” Frankie said.
“Yes, well, that’s okay, actually,” I said. “Because you and I can have a secret, too. Something Lucy will never know. Just for us.”
Frankie’s eyes widened as she realized that we could splinter off and have our own relationships.
Because that’s how it is with sisters, especially three of them.
We’re never three separate circles, forming perfect Venn diagrams, with overlapping sections equaling the same size.
Instead, our intersections morph and twist and sometimes disappear depending on the time of year or month—who’s busy with midterms or bat mitzvah preparation. Who needs help. Who thinks they don’t.
“What should our secret be?” Frankie asked.
I looked down at the pen and paper in my hand and drew a heart, then divided it into three sections, lines shooting off from the bottom point. “How about this?” I said, turning it to face her. “Whenever we see this symbol, we know the other needs us, and we drop everything to go help each other.”
We practiced drawing the heart over and over in my room for an hour, and when Lucy finally came around to see what we were up to, Frankie hid the paper behind her back, elbowing me in the ribs.
It’s stuck over the years, like when Frankie got detention for her too-short skirt, when Dad learned I spent $150 at the Book Bonanza without his permission—but we never discussed it out loud again.
I never learned if Frankie ended up having a secret with Lucy, though I always wondered if they found a way to create a bond that didn’t include me.
“Come on,” Lucy says as we pull into the police station parking lot. “It’s time, Ethan.”
“I can’t go in there. I can’t.” He’s shaking his head now, his arms folded over his stomach.
Ethan whimpers beside her as Lucy turns around and plays with the ends of her hair. Help me.
I reach out my hand and graze his shoulder, feeling him stiff beneath my touch. “We’re going to tell them what we saw,” I say. “That’s it. My dad’s already in there. Frankie texted me.”
Lucy nods. “Everything’s going to be all right. It’s just a few questions.”
Ethan sniffles and turns his head to face me. “Stay with me?” he asks. “I can’t do it alone.”
A rock sinks to the bottom of my stomach. How has this dead body, Billy’s dead body, forced those words out of Ethan’s lips?
“Of course,” I say, and mean it.
—
Ethan and I sit side by side in uncomfortable metal chairs behind a table as my dad paces the room, waiting for the detective to take a seat. When she finally does, she flips open a manila folder, and her perfect red manicure is stark against the white papers.
“Thanks for coming in, kids,” Detective Hampton says. “We need some more information on what happened.”
My dad stops pacing behind us and rests a hand on my shoulder. “These two have been through a lot today,” he says. “Let’s keep this as short as we can?”
Hampton flicks her eyes to him but then turns her gaze back to me.
“Can you walk me through the events that led up to you swimming out to the body?” she says. “To Billy?”
I knit my hands together in my lap and recount the morning step-by-step. But I don’t know how to explain to her how cold Billy was. How his skin was tinted blue, how obvious it was there was nothing left to save. My breathing grows ragged, and I’m suddenly dizzy, air coming to me in gasps.
When I finally finish speaking, I’m left with only this understanding: Billy Godwin is dead, and I held his lifeless body in my arms.
“She was amazing,” Ethan says quietly. “I…I couldn’t do anything.”
“You were in shock. We both were.” I swallow and force out the words. “Was there a chance I could have…we could have…”
“He’d been dead for hours by the time you found him,” she says, her voice kinder than it was a few minutes before. “There was no way you could have saved him.”
“Oh.” I clench my hands into fists and glance at my dad, whose arms are crossed over his chest.
“Billy had some marks on his body,” she says, her voice still kind but affirmative, like she has a plan. “Did you see them?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. The ripped jeans. His bruised torso. Scratches up and down his arms. A wound on his scalp. Slashes on his cheeks. I blink, desperate to rid the images from my mind.
I nod at the same time Ethan says, “No. Not at all.” I turn to him and wonder how he could have missed them. “I don’t understand,” Ethan says. “I thought he drowned.”
“We don’t have a cause of death right now,” Hampton says. “It could take weeks before we have answers.”
Dad rests a hand on my shoulder. “I think that may be enough for today,” he says. “These kids have been through hell, and I’d like to get them home.”
Hampton’s mouth spreads into a thin line as she looks back and forth between Ethan and me. Ethan’s chest begins to rise and fall quickly, so noticeable I can see his torso move out of the corner of my eye.
“I’d really like to ask a few more questions,” she says. “Especially of Mr. Silver. We’re hoping to learn more information about Billy’s movements last night. We heard he threw a party.”
Ethan looks to my dad, communicating something I can’t quite understand, and my dad shakes his head. “We’re leaving. But if you’d like to ask them anything else again, you can call me, their lawyer. Understand?”
Detective Hampton makes a sucking noise, then stands, grabbing the folder in front of her.
The hallway is so quiet I can hear our shoes squeak against the tiled floor as we walk to the lobby.
“What did she mean by—” I start, but Dad shakes his head quickly.
“Honey, would you wait by the car for Lucy?” he says. “She’ll take you home.”
I remember the words Ethan said to me: Stay with me. “Ethan, are you…” I ask.
But he won’t meet my gaze. His hands are by his sides, his thumbs flexing back and forth. He nods once, and Dad leads Ethan to his black SUV parked next to Lucy’s. Together they get inside, and I watch them drive away.