“What?” I said. Ready now, suddenly, for whatever hell was waiting for me behind his lips. When he didn’t answer, I threw the rag at him, watching it slap into his chest and leave a wet stain against his shirt. “What?” I practically screamed. Louise moved up next to me and laid one hand on my forearm. Her touch, usually the closest thing I had to a mother’s comfort, burrowed under my skin, and I jerked away, my whole body buzzing like a downed power line.

“It’s Junie, Eve,” Cal said. “It’s Junie.” His voice broke and he glanced away, his throat working. “You need to come with me.”

I felt rooted to the spot, my feet sinking into the floor, my body heavy and leaden. “Is she dead?” Next to me Louise sucked in a sharp breath. That one sound letting me know that I’d gone a step too far, made a leap that Louise never would have. But Louise hadn’t grown up the same way I had. No money, yeah. Food stamps and government cheese, yeah. But not violence. Not raised in a double-wide that stunk of random men and meth burners. Not strange faces and too much laughter, most of it jagged and mean. All of it nestled in the armpit of the Ozarks, a place only fifteen miles down the road, but so backwater, so hidden from the wider world, that it felt like its own dark pocket of time.

But Cal knew. He looked back at me, held my gaze. My brother never lied, not to me. Whatever came next would be the truth, whether I could stand it or not. “Yeah,” he said finally. “She’s gone. I’m sorry, Evie.”

“How?” I heard myself say, voice far away like a helium balloon drifting above my head.

Cal’s jaw tightened, and he sucked in a breath through his nose. “It looks like she was murdered.” It wouldn’t be until later, when I knew all the awful details, that I would remember this moment and realize how, even then, my brother was trying to spare me from something.

In my mind, I fell to the floor, mouth twisted and howling. Screamed my throat raw. Ripped out my own hair. Slammed face-first into the linoleum until my nose burst and dark blood flowed. But in reality, I simply turned and grabbed my coat and purse off the hook behind me, catching a single glimpse of Thomas’s shocked face, his mouth open and eyes wide. Walked past Louise’s outstretched hand and around my brother’s reaching arm. Pushed out into the cold, snow-scented air, squinted against the weak sunlight tearing through the clouds. It had happened now, finally. The disaster I’d been anticipating from the second Junie was born. And I had never even seen it coming.