Earlier, Eileen had spoken with the lead investigator about Clare’s gun and her concerns for Simon. He had assured her that, when the time came, most likely in a few months, it would be returned to her instead. Eileen wasn’t sure what she would do with the 9mm. Sell it? Keep it? It had been their mother’s, and so there was the sentimentality, or something like that—family tradition, nostalgia. Why else did she still have her own gun that had been, like her sister’s, given to her when she had left the house for college? But when she thought about receiving Clare’s weapon, currently tagged and bagged in some evidence room, the only emotions she felt were regret and revulsion. It was no longer simply a gun.

It had given her sister the means to remove her own life from this world.

It brought Eileen some relief to know that there was no way it would end up in Simon’s hands. It was all too easy to imagine him one night, despondent and alone in Clare’s seaside mansion. The gun stored in one of his desk drawers right next to all his dead wife’s work—way too accessible. He might be in a better mental space right now, but that could change in an instant—and an instant was all he would need. She supposed that if he ever became as determined as Clare to take his own life, the absence of this one gun wouldn’t stop him, but with it gone, it might slow things down. Give him time to think, to make a new choice.

She would have both her mother’s old guns dismantled and destroyed.

She checked the guest bedroom one more time, under the bed, behind the curtains, behind the bathroom door to make sure she had everything before heading down the hall to Clare’s study one more time. When she entered, Simon was on the floor in front of Clare’s bookcase with piles of her journals all around him.

Yesterday, after the memorial service, they had come back to the house and pulled Clare’s journals from two years ago. The ones from around the time she began writing her last book and Charlie’s death. Simon remembered he had been out of town and Clare had been to see their mother the day Charlie died. It took them only half an hour to find the entry.

April 21

The most tragic events of my life have been my own doing. The guilt and pain and regret—it claws away at me, hollows me out, has taken away the desire to even live. I will never forgive myself. I don’t deserve it. I never deserved it.