No One Can Know

by Kate Alice Marshall

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

By then, none of them had spoken to one another in years. It was easier to go on ignoring one another’s existences. Ignoring the house, and the horrors it held.

There was no reason for Emma to go back now. To renege on the agreement they had all sworn to, sealed with the blood of their parents. There was no reason to open that long-closed door. Not intentionally.

He wanted to be liked—or rather, he was desperate not to be disliked. So much that he whittled down every edge that he had, in case someone should find them distasteful.

And then, when Hadley had settled on Emma’s guilt, she’d still never said a word about what she’d seen. Emma had let all that blame and suspicion fall on herself. Carried all the sin and shame of her family.

“You don’t know,” she said. “Even if you think I didn’t do it, you don’t know who did. So you’ll wonder. And that means you’ll wonder about me.”

Nathan didn’t know that Emma. The one who always chose to fight instead of surrender, the one who was contrary and clever and sometimes cruel. He knew the soft Emma, the quiet Emma, the version who would bend and bend and bend and never break.

The hardest part is the patience, waiting for each layer to dry, unfinished, the promise of possibility shimmering in her mind’s eye.

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

She told me that she had information about something illegal. She wanted to turn it over, but she was worried she might get in trouble as well.

Part of her wished that one of them would say No, stay. 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.

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.

“I never wanted to know the details,” Emma said. The more she knew, the more she worried she would find out. And she hadn’t wanted the truth.

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?

But every time, that’s where it ends. There is no after to that fantasy.

If you are quiet enough, small enough, people begin to forget that you still have eyes and ears, that you can hear their murmured conversations and see their furtive errands.

She’d hated them in a way that was indistinguishable from love, loved them in a way that might have been hatred.