happened gradually. A fade from Technicolor to gray scale, pixel by pixel, over months, until the color was gone completely.
She’d looked around and found no friends. She’d checked her calendar, and the arts program deadlines had passed—which was just as well, because she hadn’t drawn or painted anything worth a damn since the exhibit.
She still had the drinks, though, and those could be easily bribed out of Asher. For a while she’d lived her life in black and white, no feeling. A drink. A shift at Safeway. A drink. A shift. A drink. The drinking replaced art, friends, even TV.
She’d made money in the meantime. She’d used it to buy a van, and she’d equipped that van’s glove compartment with additional drinks. It had been a nice routine, until it wasn’t anymore. Until it got harder to wake up, pointless to draw on eyeliner, draining to work another shift of scanning and bagging and taking coupons. Until the drinking itself got dull.
Then one night, filled with more whiskey than she’d ever contained, Eileen had gotten real with herself: She was no artist, as she’d thought at fourteen. She was an illegitimate kid, with a murderer for a dad, two sisters who’d become strangers, and a mom as distant as the moon.
And it all seemed suddenly, suffocatingly heavy.
The heaviness pushed down hard—so hard that Eileen didn’t have the energy to feel sad. In that blank space she’d been free from feeling anything. And feeling nothing, she’d almost felt fine.
Why didn’t she feel fine anymore?
Patrick Enright, and the law offices of Knutsen and Crowley, and Murphy with her freckles, and Claire with her god-awful heartfelt confession—they’d upset the order of things, and the stabbing sensation beneath Eileen’s ribs wasn’t going away, no matter how hard she dug her teeth into sugary gum.
She really, really needed a drink.
There was none to be found in this house though, Eileen knew. She’d already surveyed every inch of it on what Murphy had called their reconnaissance mission, making careful note of hiding places for life-changing documents and whiskey bottles alike. No drop of liquor in the pantry, no worthy documents in any of these forty-seven boxes. She’d exhausted her options, on both counts.
From her shut-eyed sprawl, Eileen listened to the sounds of the winter storm. The squall had been going on for so long, it had become white noise—slatting rain, pressing wind, occasional bursts of sleet.
Eileen didn’t believe in omens, but she did believe in ebbs and flows. The tide of life drew back, surged forward. Time was as cyclical as her drinking routine. Once, three siblings had lived in this house. Three brothers, each with their own unique tale of woe. And here, three siblings lived again. Three Sullivan sisters, alone in their separate corners. Just as they’d been in Emmet.
A new sound reached Eileen’s pricked ears: creaking wood.
She opened her eyes to see Claire on the grand staircase. Her makeup was, for once, imperfect, exposing a reddened nose and dark-circled eyes. She’d been crying, of course. Moping around in one of those upstairs rooms.
A few days back, Eileen might have said something cutting: Feeling sorry for yourself, huh? Today, she didn’t have the energy. Or maybe she didn’t have the heart.
“Hey,” Claire said, soft and flat.
She descended the remaining stairs, stopping feet from Eileen and, after seemingly thinking it through, sitting crisscross on the floor.
“Didn’t find what you were looking for in those boxes?” she asked Eileen.
“Nope.”
If only Claire knew the half of it. Eileen wondered, if she’d found the letters five, not two years ago—would she have shared them with Claire? Or had the letters been part of the problem, a reason why she’d pulled away?
“You, uh … cool?” Eileen asked.
What kind of question was that? No, Claire clearly wasn’t cool.
“I guess I’m in shock,” Claire said, idly tapping the soles of her glitter Keds. “I was sure, you know? I’d never been so sure of something in my life.”
“I mean,” said Eileen, “if we were placing bets on college admission, I’d put my money on you.”
Their eyes caught—blue on brown. Claire parted her lips, widened her eyes, looking almost … grateful? A way she hadn’t looked in a long time. Maybe not since the day Eileen had given her that old iPhone.
The knifing sensation sharpened at Eileen’s ribs.
“My counselor told me not to get my hopes up,” Claire said. “That it was a long shot. A ton of people get good test scores and GPAs, and I needed something that made me