Olive snuck a look at Helen, saw she had this I’ve been caught guilty kind of look on her face that made Olive squirm. Olive shrank down, hunching her shoulders, scrubbing hard at the brick. She wished she could disappear altogether. Get up and run away, but that would be too weird. She hated when grown-ups fought. There were too many times when her mom and dad were arguing and there was Olive, sitting right at the table, sinking lower and lower into her chair, practicing becoming invisible. She’d seen her mom fight with Aunt Riley once, too, which was weird because they were like best friends. Riley came to pick her mom up for something, but her mom said she wasn’t going, that she had other plans. “You have to go,” Riley had said. Mama had refused. “There are some things you don’t bail on and this is one of them,” Riley had hissed, and she was all pissed off, like going out to hear some crappy band play on two-dollar beer night was the most important thing that had ever happened. But Olive understood now it probably wasn’t what they were going to that was important, but the fact that they were doing it together; that her mother was blowing off Riley.

Mama had refused to go, and Riley had slammed the door on her way out. It was the only time Olive could ever remember seeing her aunt totally lose her cool.

Nate stood over them now, looking down at Helen, eyes blazing with their own fire. “That’s why you went there, right?” he demanded. “You knew about the fire. And you wanted the bricks because of the fire, because of the people who died.”

“Nate, just calm down. I think there’s a possibility that—”

“Jesus, Helen,” he spat, interrupting her. “Why can’t we just use bricks from Home Depot? What’s this sudden obsession you have with filling our house with these things steeped in dark history?”

Dark history.

Olive liked that. She touched her T-shirt, feeling for the necklace underneath.

I see all.

“Bricks from Home Depot don’t tell a story,” Helen said.

He let out a long, dramatic sigh. “You know I love that you want to put things in the house that have history, that tell a story. But do the stories have to be such awful ones? Do they have to center around death and tragedy?”

She didn’t answer.

Maybe Nate wasn’t the only one going a little crazy. Maybe Helen was, too. The thought hit Olive like a cannonball in the stomach.

Helen had been keeping secrets.

Olive’s mother had been keeping secrets, too, and look where they got her.

Nate didn’t wait for Helen to respond or reprimand him for swearing in front of Olive. He just stalked through the front door of the house, calling back, “I’m going to go start wiring the upstairs.”