Emily started to cry then. Her own mom died in a terrible road accident when she was six, ruining her dad so utterly that he no longer even seemed to know that Esme was there. With Jill, there was again some of that barely-remembered state of refuge—a text asking if you were okay when you were fifteen minutes late, soft carpets instead of cast-off throw rugs, someone who knew you liked brown sugar but not raisins on your oatmeal. And so Jill sharpened Emily into an instrument of her own wrath. She made her do things she hated doing. She did them because she wanted Jill’s love.

“It was all you, then,” I said. “Every bit of it.”

“It was all me.”

Emily egged our house and wrote threatening messages on our garage doors in red paint. She tore up our roses and scattered the contents of our mailbox in the street. Jill once suggested that she poison our dog, but she refused. It was Emily who broke in and blacked out Stefan’s eyes on our family photos, who entered our house surreptitiously half a dozen times, stealing small things, my grandmother’s opal watch, my tiny marble bust of Pallas with a raven on her head and the inscription, Nevermore, my first edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She stole my dark pink Pauline Saucedo scarf, the one Jill was wearing in a news photo I later saw. I had never quite figured out why I kept staring at that photo like those drawings of hidden pictures from my childhood. Can you find the teaspoon, can you find the mitten...

Before she could go on, Stefan spoke up. “What if you had killed us on the road that time?”

“It was never supposed to go that far,” Emily said.

Following Jill’s orders, Emily disguised herself as a male figure in a hoodie, with mirrored sunglasses. “Just to scare you.”

“But you couldn’t control something like that! In a blizzard! You could have killed yourself too. Would Jill have wanted that?”

She dropped her face in her hands.

“She got totally ruthless,” Emily admitted. “She didn’t care what happened to Stefan. She pushed me. She wasn’t as nice anymore.” When Emily balked at trying to hurt us on the road, Jill said such niceties shouldn’t really matter to someone who’d already attempted murder.

What did Emily mean by that, I thought?