“What about it?”
“What did you do before you came to the Grove?” I asked. That was important. In the hours before I’d send my team to go eliminate the group of hunters, they’d taken someone very important to Helena. They’d stolen her little brother, and they’d slaughtered him. She never talked about it to me. Not ever. I wasn’t sure if she talked to Raven about it, but I hoped that she did. Everyone needed an outlet. We all needed a way to mourn what we’d lost.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Had dinner. Hung out. Jacob and Megan went out for something. Then they came back, and we all went hunting.”
“No,” I said. “You went hunting.”
“What?”
“Why didn’t they go to the Grove with you that night?” I asked.
“I...they did go,” she said, looking confused. “They were going to meet me there.”
“Did you see them?”
“Well, no...”
“They didn’t go to the Grove. Did they tell you why they weren’t going?”
She was quiet, a
nd I could see the wheels start to turn.
“They were going to run an errand first,” she said quietly.
“All of them? Together?”
She nodded.
“Was that unusual for them? Did they really need a group of people to pick up toilet paper?” I asked.
“I...it was...they needed something from the hardware store,” she said. “Megan didn’t want to go alone. I was anxious to start hunting, so they sent me ahead.”
“And they never came,” I said. “They left you alone. They did that a lot, didn’t they?”
Another nod.
“Why did they hang out together so much?”
“They had known each other a long time before I moved in, I suppose.”
“And why did you move in? It’s strange, isn’t it? A group of hunters who all live together, but one of them is the odd man out?”
“I never really thought of it that way.”
“That’s what it was, though.”
I was being mean.
Cruel.
I was pushing her, but it was the only way I was going to be able to get her to admit that there was a problem with her relationships, and it was a deep-rooted one. They had always excluded her. From the first moment she’d joined their house, she’d been an outsider, and despite the fact that she thought they were friends, she was wrong.
She was very, very wrong.
“I don’t think that’s very fair.”
“And I don’t think the way they treated you was fair.”