and smell of him (his name she’d not forget, and she still woke up with it full in her mouth—Wyatt). Wondering if it had all started, or ended, because of a teenage boy who was loved by two girls who happened to be sisters.
“She left one day and never came back,” Hannah finished. “We fought, she left, and I never saw her again.”
“Did she run away?” Huck asked, his voice hoarse, his eyes wide. “Have you looked for her? Now, with the internet?”
“No. They found her purse in the river. She was declared dead years ago.” Hannah touched her forehead, felt the sweat beading there. Heard her breaths coming fast and tried to regulate herself.
“I don’t understand. What happened to her?” Huck pressed.
“We don’t know. It’s still an open murder case, but without a body . . .” It was a cold, clinical dissection, she knew. “Everyone suspected them. The town turned on Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart. I was never invited back.” Not that she would have come. “It was a forbidden topic with my mother. We rarely spoke about Julia. I had to force myself to just . . . move on.”
“What do you think?” Huck asked, his voice quietly insistent but also incredulous. His face still. Hannah tried to read him and failed. How strange it must be to be told information of this magnitude so late in the game.
“I think she ran away.”
She’d never said it so definitively, out loud, before. She’d thought it plenty of times. Especially in the beginning. When Hannah first left home, got accepted to Dickinson, a private liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. When her college roommates would ask her basic questions about her family, why her mother never came to parents’ weekend. She’d say she was an only child. But she’d lie in bed at night and let her mind wander wildly. She’d try to force herself down one thought path, then another. From the obvious (Julia had been killed by a stranger in the woods and thrown in the river) to the probable (Julia had run away from Brackenhill because of some secret Hannah never understood) to the downright ridiculous (Julia was in witness protection).
Senior year of college, she found herself blurting it out one late night while studying: I had a sister who ran away. Her roommate at the time became singularly focused, perhaps even obsessed, and they spent a few nights scouring Google for signs of Julia Maloney (and all her incarnations: J. Maloney, Julie Maloney, Julia Lorraine Maloney). Somewhere between college and adulthood, Hannah had accepted that version as truth.
She didn’t utter the second part, the unformed thought: She’ll come back. She’d said it once, to her mother, years ago. They’d been fighting—no memory of what about—and Hannah spat it out, suddenly, almost violently. “Julia will come back for me.” Her mother had raged, “Julia is dead! Dead, Hannah.” She threw a pot that had been in her hand, dish soap flying, and it left a divot in the linoleum where it landed. Later in her room, Hannah tried out the word: “Dead.” Felt the heaviness of it on her tongue, the finality of it. It never felt true. As an adult, she crafted elaborate fantasies about her sister returning, their reunion, a tearful homecoming, a long dinner and a shared bottle of wine and her sister—returned to her! She’d had friendships, of course, but nothing as close as a sister. Someone to know you down to your bones, every halting sigh familiar. Someone to exchange a look with that said, I know. At a joke, a shop window, a drunken man in a crowded bar. It was the unspoken things that felt the most powerful. Hannah had lost that. Sometimes she didn’t even realize how much she missed it until she saw it pass between two other women. Sisters, mothers, neighbors.
It never occurred to her to question specifically why Julia had run away. That night, knotted tightly in her chest like a closed fist.
Hannah should not have shut Huck out. But that wasn’t quite right; it was never about Huck at all but rather what Hannah felt willing to say aloud. Her family had rarely said important things out loud, aside from Trina’s one “dead” proclamation. Her mother rarely mentioned Aunt Fae after that summer. Her mother’s most frequent emotion was fatigue—too tired to talk about Julia, Fae, Brackenhill. Too exhausted by Hannah’s presence, her relentless need to be fed, clothed, driven.