I thought maybe she would’ve tried to convince my father to buy her a greenhouse so she could continue her intensified obsession with botany and not focus on the fact that her daughter was awaiting trial for the murder of her best friend’s son. Instead she would go outside, brush the snow from her garden, and stab her trowel through it to crumble the frozen dirt. The only garden she hadn’t touched was my father’s vegetable garden. Most of the vegetables had been dug up by an animal last August, but the rest died in October when Emily was arrested and, unlike my mother, my father stopped caring about plant life.

A few of our neighbors—ones who used to be friends—peered out from the safety of their windows and watched her crouch in front of the flower beds, always a glimmer of anxiousness in their eyes. It was the first murder committed here in Shiloh in years, the first in decades committed by an actual resident. Everyone looked at my mother and thought, This is your fault. You raised her. How could you not know?

But no one had thought my sister, Emily Porterfield, was messed up. They’d thought she was perfectly normal too, with her cheerleading uniform and her pom-poms waving frantically in the air like fireworks at the games. She’d babysat their children. She’d sold Girl Scout cookies to them in the spring. She’d walked their dogs and even scooped up their poop instead of leaving it there. Emily Porterfield just wasn’t messed up.

Downstairs, I heard our answering machine playing a message left half an hour ago, while she was outside and I was in my bedroom. The message was from my father, apologizing for working late again tonight, mumbling we should eat dinner without him, don’t wait up. A moment later, my mother pressed the delete Message button.

Sometimes she asked me if I knew why Emily had killed Griffin Tomlin, if it was just an accident, if I knew why Emily had snuck out of the house and crept across the street into the Tomlins’ backyard that night. Every time she asked me a question about her, about him, about them, I would tell her no, even when it wasn’t true. No, I didn’t know why she’d done it. No, I didn’t know why she went there. No, no, no. Sometimes I imagined Emily in a white cinder-block room, dressed in a jailhouse uniform instead of her cheerleader one, and her lips mouthing the word liar at me.

Because I knew why she’d done it.

I knew that Emily hated Griffin Tomlin the moment I’d told her something I never should have.

My parents and I haven’t talked about it, but every day I’ve driven Emily’s car to school.