wait if you’d rather be alone.”
“No way. Come sit.”
Daphne flops onto the couch and sighs. “Leo and Eva are having a private conversation. It’s bullshit, if you ask me. The two of them keep all kinds of secrets and everybody else has to wait to know anything.”
“He said they were meeting this morning, but if it makes you feel better, he didn’t tell me what they were going to talk about either.”
She flips a throw blanket off the back of the sofa and tucks it around herself. “It does.”
I close my book and let it rest on my lap. “But not really.”
Leo’s younger sister chews at her lip like she’s weighing whether to change the subject.
In the silence, selfish thoughts crowd in. I could ask her to do something for me. I could ask her to send a message to my dad and Cash letting them know I’m all right. Cash said he didn’t think it was a good idea to call, so I haven’t. A text message is too risky. But Daphne is relatively unconnected, I think. They wouldn’t have her number.
But—no. Daphne’s my age, and as far as I can tell, she’s not wrapped up in this the way I am. The way Leo is. Putting her in the middle won’t help anything, and on top of that, she hero-worships him. Asking her at all would mean explaining the full situation to her. There’s a reason Eva and Leo sent her here. I wonder if it’s to protect her from the reality of him.
Telling her I’m here against my will would shatter her hero illusion like a cheap snow globe.
“He didn’t tell me he was in the hospital,” Daphne says finally. “Eva didn’t tell me until the day before he was supposed to leave. He could have died and I wouldn’t have known.”
My heart races. I want to tell her that it would have been better not to know, but that wouldn’t be true. I can’t tell her that it would be better for her to have seen it. Whenever my mind wanders, it always ends up back in his office, on the floor with him. The alternative is imagining him dying alone. It’s all terrible.
“I know it was a Constantine who did it.” Daphne balls up her hands in the blankets. “A person paid by the Constantines, I mean.”
“Yeah.” I can still see Ronan’s hand on the gun. “It was.”
Daphne looks toward the fireplace, the light alive on her skin. Leo was standing in firelight when Ronan pulled the trigger. He is beautiful always, but the warm glow loves him. It loved him while his blood covered my clothes and his body searched for a way out of the pain. It loved him while he was dying.
Curling my hands around the book gives me something to hold on to. Daphne looks at me again. Looks me up and down. It reminds me of Eva. “You’re a Constantine.”
I nod.
“He didn’t tell me that, either. He just said your name was Haley. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? You have the Constantine look.”
“That’s about all I have. I’m not from the part of the family with money.” A pang in my chest, thinking of our house with its run-down siding and burn marks on the ceiling from my dad’s experiments and the little bedrooms, each one smaller than Leo’s closet.
“Why do you all hate him so much?” Daphne’s question doesn’t hold any venom. It’s not a barb. She wants to know.
“I don’t hate him.” I say it without thinking. I only know it’s true after the words are out of my mouth. “And…I don’t know about the rest of my relatives.” Family seems like too intimate a word for what Caroline and her children are to me and my dad and Cash. “It’s complicated.”
Daphne’s expression stays curious and open. “Complicated how?”
“I think sometimes hate is really a cover for fear.”
“He’s not that scary,” she huffs, flicking her eyes toward the ceiling.
When they come back down to mine, one corner of her mouth is curved up.
I’m the one who breaks first, dissolving into laughter and dropping the book in the process. Daphne laughs at me, and it sets me off again. My abs ache but I can’t stop. Finally I stare into the fireplace and think about plagues and avoidable car accidents. It half-works.
Over on the couch, Daphne wipes at her eyes. “Fine, fine, fine. I know he’s terrifying. He thinks I don’t know, but I do. Everyone in Bishop’s Landing