No One Can Know

by Kate Alice Marshall

“You are perfectly capable if you apply yourself. Keep going.”

walks swiftly out of the room, her vision blurring with tears as the pain overtakes the outrage.

You are safer forgotten.”

“I know no one in this town lets go of a grudge.”

She’d wanted so badly to belong here, once upon a time. But neither of them said anything, and she walked back to her car alone.

The distance and Lorelei’s words are all she needs.

She tries to think of what she has done that might merit this kind of punishment.

This is the first question, always. If you don’t answer, your punishment will be more severe. But if you guess wrong, you’re only inviting worse.

You don’t even like me.”

I’m already not what you want, so what’s the point?”

She knows she’s making it worse for herself, but she can’t stop.

She wants to shut her eyes, but she knows better. It will be over

quickly, she tells herself. He does not leave marks where they can be seen, he does not lose control. He does not strike them out of anger, he tells them. It is not punishment but a lesson.

oof

“Fuck. You,”

But the worst that can happen already has. Her work, her way out, is ruined.

But he only ever brought them up at times like these.

She hated it. Hated the feeling of being watched, her every movement monitored, and feeling like she couldn’t make a spontaneous trip to the new bakery in town without it being treated as suspicious.

She gritted her teeth. Talk about a thing too much, you’re obsessed. Talk about it too little, you’re

hiding something. And no such thing as a middle ground. She could never get it right. That perfect balancing act of the right way to speak, to be, to look, to feel, so your innocence could be confirmed. Once you were tainted you could never get clean.

Gabriel wasn’t just kind and handsome and funny—he was safe.

“You never told me you used to paint.”

do you not listen to your wife when she talks to you,dubass

You lose a dream and it starts to hurt to even remember you ever had it.”

You wouldn’t have to keep all these secrets if you didn’t know something.”

says the one who doesnt have a sjngle skeleton in his closet

Learned it well, after she came home at fifteen with what her mother deemed a whorish amount of makeup and her father asked her if she’d done anything with that boy she ought to be ashamed of.

“At least there’s one of my children I don’t have to worry about.”

She removes the two sweaters on top and takes out her boots—Doc Martens, her prize possession—and a change of clothes.

hmmmh

and listens again for the sound of movement in the house, but there’s nothing.

Daphne won’t tell. Daphne keeps everyone’s secrets.

She doesn’t think she can complain, not really. It doesn’t happen often, and it rarely even leaves a mark, and she lives a comfortable life.

still abuse

Each night she leaves, there is a moment of pleasurable adrenaline, a moment when she thinks, You have no idea who I am. A moment when that statement is a triumph, instead of a fearful whisper. Who am I? I am a secret,

Someday she will show them that she doesn’t belong to them at all.

she imagined him monitoring the sound of her footsteps and felt his attention on her, inescapable.

When had she decided that it was better to be miserable than to be alone, she wondered. Or had that always been the price she was paying?

“Right. You’re a good little liberal who hates guns,” Nathan said, rolling his eyes,

jackass

“Yes, that’s why. It couldn’t be because my parents were murdered with a gun. That I grew up with a dad who thought it was funny to point them at us as a joke,” Emma said, cheeks hot. “Get rid of them. Sell them, have them melted down, I don’t care.”

ttoo close to home

She was afraid of so many things; he had never been one of them, and he wasn’t now. But she couldn’t be here.

Juliette was a good kid who wanted to be bad for a while.

She’d been so wrapped up in her own anger and misery, she’d never looked twice at the people closest to her.

“He makes me feel less alone,

She wanted it but not like that,

She knows what she is. She knows it should be fine, but it isn’t, not for her, not for her father.

ooof too close to home

Does he know? Can he tell? He can’t

know. No one can. Not until she gets away, and she can’t get away until Daphne is out of the house, because Emma doesn’t understand how the rules work, that someone needs to keep Mom and Dad happy so that they don’t realize that Daphne is strange in a way that they haven’t quite noticed and will never understand.

She’d told Vic so much—more than she’d ever told anyone. But there were things she hadn’t admitted even to her.

She had always thought of herself as the one in control. The one who knew what to do, who understood the world and how to survive it.

Everything was falling apart, and this time, Emma wasn’t going to be willing to shoulder the blame.

But it wasn’t at all amusing to be inside of that relentless what-if.

but her father had converted it into a workshop, for those times when he decided that being a man meant cutting up pieces of wood and screwing them together in a different configuration.

Everyone keeps secrets.

The stones carry her secrets to the river and the river swallows them up.