Chapter 3

The first time my family decided I was dangerous, Chloe and I were eight.

She fell into the pool during a neighborhood party. I had been on the other side of the yard, arguing with Caleb over a popsicle, but by the time an adult pulled Chloe from the water, she was crying my name.

Mom took it as an accusation.

"Why didn't you save her?" Evelyn demanded.

"I didn't see her fall."

"She's your sister. You should have been watching."

By morning, the story had changed. I hadn't merely failed to help. I had stood by because I was jealous. By the end of the week, Mom was asking whether I had pushed Chloe.

I denied it until my throat hurt. Nathan told me that innocent people didn't get so defensive. Owen said Chloe was too gentle to invent something like that. Caleb stopped sitting beside me at breakfast.

My parents sent me to boarding school "until I learned to behave."

I came home once a year.

The school sat forty minutes outside the city, behind a stone wall topped with rusted wire. It billed itself as a program for difficult girls. The brochure showed tennis courts and bright dorm rooms. It didn't show the shower stalls with broken locks or the older girls who knew no one would believe me if I called home.

For eight years, Chloe grew up in the Bennett house while I watched from a distance. On our birthday, my family hired a company to put on a fireworks and drone show that spelled her name in lights.

From the school roof, I could just make out the glow over the city.

C-H-L-O-E.

No C-L-A-I-R-E followed.

I told myself that next year would be different. Mom would remember. Nathan would drive out to get me. Someone would ask why I had bruises beneath my uniform sleeves.

No one came.

When the state finally shut the school down, the Bennetts brought me home because they had nowhere else to leave me. I hid what had happened there. I cooked when Mom worked late. I kept my grades high. I stopped asking for birthday presents.

They called my good behavior manipulative.

Then Chloe got food poisoning.

She'd eaten takeout after a dance rehearsal. I hadn't even been home when it arrived, but Nathan decided I must have ordered it to make her sick. He locked me in the basement while the family took Chloe to the hospital.

I screamed until my voice gave out. I pounded on the door until my knuckles split. No one returned that night.

Or the next.

On the third day, I lay beside the washing machine and listened to water move through the pipes overhead. I counted every rush of water. It meant the house was still up there.

When the door finally opened, Caleb stared down as if he had forgotten what they had put there.

"Oh," he said. "You're still here."

Afterward, my stomach never felt right. Some nights the pain folded me in half. I went to Mom once and asked her to take me to urgent care.

She didn't look up from Chloe's college applications.

"Are you doing this again?"

"Doing what?"

"Trying to make us feel sorry for you."

Nathan was home that night. He leaned in the kitchen doorway and watched me press both hands to my abdomen.

"Nobody's buying it," he said. "If you want to die so badly, go do it somewhere else. Don't expect any of us to come collect your body."

So I left.

I worked, rented the smallest apartment I could find, and ignored the pain until it became impossible to ignore. By the time a doctor ordered scans, the cancer had spread.

Now, with blood soaking through my second bandage, Nathan's old words felt less like cruelty than instructions.

Somewhere else.

No one had to collect me.

I pushed myself upright and took my handbag. The elevator was out again, so I climbed the stairs to the roof.

Each landing left me dizzier. By the time I reached the final door, my breath came in short pulls and my knees shook.

The roof was empty. Wind rushed between the apartment towers and tugged at my dress. I walked to the edge.

At school, I'd stood on another roof more times than I could count. I had always climbed down because some stubborn part of me believed my family might come the next morning.

That stubborn part had finally gone quiet.