No One Can Know

by Kate Alice Marshall

Emma holds a hundred questions between her teeth, biting down until her jaw aches. She doesn’t ask. Will never ask.

It isn’t that she’s afraid of the

answers. She’s afraid she already...

She always had to know what she would find when she walked in the front door

of her own home.

She was always the one with the plan.

But people needed stories to make sense of things, and she had learned to give them what they needed.

Secrets shifted beneath her skin, ready to bloom.

She wondered if he believed her. She wondered if anyone had ever

believed her.

she wondered if he tasted the secrets lingering there. The secrets still hidden within the walls of the house that was drawing them, inescapably, home.

But she’d never confessed. And she’d never told.

She’ll let him lie to her. It’s only fair. Lies are all she has to give him, too.

She lets the shudder that she has been holding back ripple over her shoulders and pulls her knees to her chest. She likes to imagine that she can fold herself in half and in half again, over and over until

she is a tiny speck drifting. Until she is nothing at all.

no longer starved for her mother’s approval but still starving herself.

She took up space, and she liked it.

She would be alone again. It was only a matter of time, unless she could make him believe. But how could she, when there was still so much she’d kept from him?

Daphne seizing Emma’s hand,

and whispering four words. “No one can know.”

All she had wanted back then was to have them with her. She didn’t know what had happened and it hadn’t mattered—the only thing she had cared about was keeping them safe. Keeping them together.

She hadn’t run from her past all these years so much as she’d ignored it.

If she wanted her secrets safe, she was going to have to do something about it.

She needed to think of more than just herself.

He already knew she was damaged.

Emma went out to the porch to wait, as she had when she was sixteen years old, for the police to arrive.

She was the one causing trouble, being rude.

It wasn’t like it had ever done a thing to protect them.

now—how her mother is so controlled because she is afraid that if she relaxes, she will slip up,

She knows she’s stretching herself too thin, but what choice does she have?

She’s the kind of person you call beautiful because she is thin and has good teeth and an expensive haircut.

And Irene Palmer knows that life is better for all of them when Randolph is happy.

But when Emma thought back all she could remember was her anger, and the feeling of being trapped.

A pregnancy wasn’t a promise.

She knew how to shoot—you couldn’t have Randolph Palmer for a father and not be intimately familiar with how to handle a gun—but

Behind the carefully constructed mask, behind the performance of sisterly concern, Emma saw it. A flicker of fear.

Something about Emma coming back to the house had worried her. Spooked her, even.

Her words were edged with the tears that always seemed to be on the surface these days.

Now she felt like she was falling apart more than ever,

And I’m not going to be a prisoner in this house because you’re worried about gossip.”

No, she wasn’t acting like herself—not the Emma that he knew, at least. Not the Emma she had created painstakingly, a rebuke to the girl she had been. But now

she was home, and that old Emma had been waiting for her here the whole time. A ghost in this house.

“I’ll stay in. I won’t leave,” she said, lying as she had so many times before.

She’d unpacked her suitcase immediately, putting her clothes away tidily in the drawers. Whenever she traveled, she liked to do that right away. It was a way of having standards.

Dogs were easy. You just had to work out what they wanted—love, treats, praise—and make them understand what you wanted.

She’d built this place up so much in her mind.

Was there anything left in the house to find? No. Surely not.

a fraction of a second’s shutter-click securing the illusion of success.

She pressed a hand against her chest, feeling the steady thump of her heart and the strength of her own flesh. She was not that sprig of a girl anymore.

Worry when it looks perfect, because that means you’ve caught up with your own ambition and judgment. Dissatisfaction is the engine of creativity.