“Oh, yes. It was. She . . . lingered for a few months, but was never her real self again. There was nothing anyone could do to help her. It was awful.”

Watching someone deteriorate before your eyes, being powerless to save them? I wondered briefly if that would be worse than losing a person suddenly, out of nowhere, the way I had. At least she had a chance to say goodbye, I thought.

“Do you want to know something?” Laura said quietly. “I’ve never told anyone this. But maybe the reason I don’t talk about Lily is because we didn’t get along.” She turned to me, anxious. “I know I’m not the easiest person to live with, but Lily . . . she was something else. She was a liar.”

I held my breath.

“Pathological,” Laura said. “And she disliked me immensely. She was vicious. But what had I ever done to her, besides try to be supportive?”

“So, did you get to be better friends when she was sick?” The obituary had said Laura was her constant companion—but I couldn’t admit to having read the obituary.

“Not exactly friends,” she replied. “I nursed her the whole time she was sick. I was there by her side. It was thankless, and it made her hate me even more.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “Really. I’m sorry.”

“Life is terrible sometimes,” Laura said, shrugging her thin, tense shoulders. “That’s just the way it goes.”

“Yeah.”

“Who knows what Lily would have grown into? She fell in with some very questionable friends.” Laura clucked her tongue. “Who knows what she might have done to Copeland Hall if she had lived.”

I felt stunned and slightly horrified. It almost sounded as if Laura was glad her sister had died. That didn’t make sense at all. But it did make me wonder if this was how she had developed her fear of Agatha falling in with bad kids.

I didn’t ask for clarity. We’d almost reached the house, and I knew that we weren’t going to be continuing this talk. As if it was a dirty thing that belonged out in the wild and shouldn’t be brought inside.

I WENT UP to the nursery, looking forward to scrubbing away not only the sweat and dirt but also the feeling our conversation had left with me.

“Ags—” I cut myself off when I walked into the nursery. Her chair at the desk was empty. I walked back out and checked the hall bathroom, and then I went back and looked into my bathroom and my bedroom. Finding both of those deserted, I went out and stood in the hall helplessly.

I was about to go downstairs when, across the hall, Agatha’s old bedroom door opened. Agatha herself came out, with something tucked under her arm.

She shoved the object at me, and I heard a clunk.