Taryn turns on the shower, adjusting the taps and then guiding me over the tub’s edge to stand in the warming spray. Being sisters, we’ve seen each other naked a bajillion times over the years, but as her gaze goes to the messy scar on my leg, I recall she’s never seen it before.
“Vivi said something,” Taryn says slowly. “About the night before my wedding. You were late, and when you came, you were quiet and pale. Sick. I worried it was because you still loved him, but Vivi insists that isn’t true. She says you got hurt.”
I nod. “I remember that night.”
“Did Locke … do something?” She isn’t looking at me now. Her gaze is on the tiles, then on a framed drawing Oak did of Heather, brown crayon for her skin bleeding into pink for her hair.
I grab the body wash that Vivi buys at the organic store, the one that’s supposed to be naturally antibacterial, and smear it liberally over the dried blood. It smells bleachy and stings like hell. “You mean, did he try to kill me?”
Taryn nods. I catch her eye. She already knows the answer. “Why didn’t you say something? Why did you let me marry him?” she demands.
“I didn’t know,” I admit. “I didn’t know it was Locke who’d led a hunt for me until I saw you wearing the earrings I lost that night. And then I got taken by the Undersea. And soon after I got back, you betrayed me, so I figured it didn’t matter.”
Taryn frowns, clearly torn between the urge to argue and an effort to stay quiet to win me over. A moment later, arguing triumphs. We’re twins, after all. “I just did what Dad said! I didn’t think it mattered. You had all that power and you wouldn’t use it. But I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I think I prefer Locke and his friends chasing me around the woods to you stabbing me in the back. Again.”
I can see her visibly stopping herself from saying anything more, taking a breath, biting her tongue. “I’m sorry,” she says, and slips out of the bathroom, leaving me to finish my shower alone.
I turn up the heat and take a long time.
When I come out, Heather has left, and Taryn has gone through the fridge and constructed some kind of nervous-energy tea party out of our leftovers. A big pot of tea sits at the center of the table, along with a smaller pot of the yarrow. She has taken our last half sleeve of gingersnap cookies and arranged them on a tray. Our bread got turned into two kinds of sandwiches: ham and celery, peanut butter and Cheerios.
Vivi is brewing a pot of coffee and watching Taryn with a worried expression. I pour myself a mug of the healing tea and drink it down, then pour myself another. Clean, bandaged, and dressed in new clothes, I feel a lot more clearheaded and ready to deal with the news that Locke is dead and that my twin sister murdered him.
I pick up a ham sandwich and take a bite. The celery is crunchy and a little weird, but not bad. Suddenly, I am aware of how hungry I am. I shove the rest of the sandwich into my mouth and pile two more onto a plate.
Taryn wrings her hands, pressing them together and then against her dress. “I snapped,” she says. Neither Vivi nor I speak. I try to crunch my celery more quietly.
“He promised he would love me until he died, but his love didn’t protect me from his unkindness. He warned me that the Folk don’t love as we do. I didn’t understand until he left me alone in his great, awful house for weeks on end. I cultivated hybrid roses in the garden and commissioned new curtains and hosted month-long revels for his friends. It didn’t matter. I was sometimes louche and sometimes chaste. I gave him everything. But he said that all the story had gone out of me.”
I raise my eyebrows. That was an awful thing for him to say, but not necessarily what I expected to be his last words. “I guess you showed him.”
Vivi laughs abruptly and then glares at me for making her laugh.
Taryn’s eyelashes sparkle with unshed tears. “I guess so,” she says in a flat, dull voice that I find hard to interpret. “I tried to explain how things had to change—they had to—but he acted as though I was being ridiculous. He kept talking, as if he could talk me out of my own feelings. There was a jeweled letter opener on the desk and—you remember all those lessons Madoc gave us? The next thing I knew, the point of it was in Locke’s throat. And then he was finally quiet, but when I took it out, there was so much blood.”
“So you didn’t mean to kill him?” Vivi asks.
Taryn doesn’t answer.
I get what it feels like to shove things down for long enough that they erupt. I also get what it’s like to shove a knife in somebody. “It’s okay,” I say, not sure if that’s true.
She turns to me. “I thought we were nothing alike, you and I. But it turns out we’re just the same.”
I don’t think she believes that to be a good thing.
“Where’s his body now?” I ask, trying to focus on the practical. “We need to get rid of it and—”
Taryn shakes her head. “His body was already discovered.”