She asked Wyatt. “There would have been remains, Hannah. You didn’t do what you think you did.”
Hannah said nothing.
Instead, she spent hours in the storm shelter, trying to shake something loose. Any memory remained locked up tight. Just one image: dirt sifting over the curve of a spade with a red handle.
You might never find her. Wyatt’s voice was gentle when he said it, but the words always felt like a slap. She knew what he thought: that she was broken and maybe even crazy. He encouraged her to see someone. Talk to someone. Hannah admitted he was right about that. And yet if she confessed, even to a therapist, would she go to prison? Then who would find her sister?
She’d tried to make sense of the after: She’d gone back to Plymouth. Her mother had stayed in her room, prayed for Julia’s return, and barely spoken to Hannah. Her stepfather never again came into her room, never laid another finger on her. She went back to start her sophomore year of high school. Did she just pick up where she’d left off?
No.
She shunned her friendships. Tracy and Beth had been confused, then distraught, then later, after months, indifferent. She’d been the girl whose sister disappeared. Died. Hannah remembered floating through the rest of high school. Probably failing but getting a pass for being so wrapped up in tragedy.
Her sister should have graduated. Hannah had one sharp memory, one moment where she might have held tight to the memory of what she’d done. The guidance counselor had called her down to her office and presented her with her sister’s graduation cap. “You should have this,” she said. She meant it to be kind.
Hannah had cried. “It’s my fault.”
Everyone thought she meant it to be dramatic. Maybe metaphorically. Maybe because they’d fought. The guidance counselor had clucked sympathetically and placed her hand on Hannah’s head. “Darling girl,” she’d said.
She saw a therapist only once: a young twentysomething blonde woman in a bright office who clicked her pen relentlessly. She looked astonishingly like Julia. The same blonde curls. The same graceful flit of her hand. Hannah never went back.
Hannah pushed through the green door and followed the tunnel that wound approximately a hundred yards. The length of a football field. A few months ago, she’d strung up heavy-duty construction lights. With the flick of a button, the tunnel illuminated, bright as a snowy Catskill morning.
As far as she could see, she’d dug wide holes—trenches, really. The floor of the storm shelter itself had already been completely unearthed, the newly turned dirt a raw reddish-brown color. She’d dug a perfectly measured four feet down.
It had taken her months. If she didn’t find what she was looking for in the tunnel now, she’d go back to the beginning, back to the shelter in the little hill, and dig another four feet down. If she had to.
She’d do it forever. She owed it to her sister.
She owed Julia that much.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Nina
Spring 2020
Nina loved the sounds of the forest. There was a bird in the distance that called every afternoon. It sounded like a bike horn that Mom had gotten her for her tenth birthday. Hannah said it was a crane.
Nina sat on the forest floor in a clearing she’d found last weekend. Everything felt different. New and fresh and alive and magical. Like anything was possible here. She could forget about school, about Quinn Palumbo and her band of mean girls that stole the key chains off her backpack when she wasn’t looking. She could forget about her best friend, Abigail, who was sometimes nice and fun and happy and sometimes not. Dad said her parents were divorcing, so Nina should have patience with her.
Nina understood divorce. But now Dad lived here, with Hannah, who was her third-favorite person, and then on weekends, she sometimes got to live here, at Brackenhill, which had quickly become her absolute favorite place. Her bedroom had a princess bed with a canopy and everything.
At Brackenhill, she just got to be alone. She got to be herself.
Sometimes the girl would find her. She lived “down the hill,” the girl told her.
Today the girl found Nina lying in the middle of the clearing. Her eyes were closed, and she was waiting for the crane. Hannah had told her cranes were creatures of habit—they lived in the same places every year. Fed in the same streams and rivers. This crane felt like hers. She hadn’t seen it yet; she’d only heard it.