“Netti?” I say again.
“Yes?” She straightens her shoulders, releases my arms, and takes a step away from me. “What are you doing?”
“I needed to talk to you,” I say. “I wasn’t sure how else to get you to…to come out of hiding.”
She narrows her eyes at me, and I shrug.
“That was…unkind,” she says.
“If you have a better way,” I tell her, “please explain it to me. We need to talk, and I couldn’t think of another way to get to you.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“How about we sit?”
She continues to look at me with apprehension as we move to the front of the fire and sit on the rug, facing each other.
“Well?” she asks.
“I need some answers,” I tell her. “And by answers, I mean truthful ones.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I saw Serenity’s obituary.” I stare at her face as her eyes darken, and she looks away from me. “I know she died when Iris was a teenager, and I know Iris wasn’t killed by her husband. You can’t keep this from me anymore. I need to know, Netti. I need to understand who all is in there and why. I have a right to know the truth.”
“What does it matter?” Netti glares at me. For the first time, I see emotion in her eyes. “What does it matter who was first and who was not? We are what we are.”
“It matters to me.” I tap myself on the chest and lean closer to her. “I’m being dragged into the middle of something that I don’t understand. I thought I had most of it figured out, and then all of a sudden, I realize all of you have been lying to me.”
“We did not lie.”
“Bullshit!” I stare at her until she can no longer hold my gaze.
“We might not have told you everything, but we didn’t lie.”
“Iris told me she died,” I say. “Seri told me that Iris died, but she didn’t. Iris lived, and Seri is the one who was killed—and not by her husband, either.”
“What we said was not a lie. It was simply…misleading.”
“You think that makes it any better?”
“It is necessary,” Netti says in her usual monotone voice. “We do it to protect Seri.”
“You’ve told me that before,” I say, “but protect her from what? From whom? Kyle? Who is Seri, huh? Who is she really?”
“She is the important one.” Netti pauses, still refusing to look into my eyes. “You know she is.”
“I don’t know that. I don’t even know what that means.”
“Seri is the good one,” Netti says. “She is the one who deserves to be in front—to live her life.”
“What about Iris?”
“Iris gets in the way. Iris is the reason we are in danger.”
“And you think keeping that from Seri protects her? How can she be safe if she doesn’t even know what’s happening?”
“When it’s necessary, we can step forward. Seri doesn’t need to know.”