If I had just stayed.
My chest seized.
She would still be here.
And I wouldn’t be breaking apart on the floor.
ONE
VIOLET
FIVE YEARS LATER
Snow started falling as my father’s expensive car—one my mother’s money had paid for—pulled into the King’s Chapter Burial Ground in Boston.
When we stepped out, I tipped my face toward the sky, letting the flakes land against my skin. But this wasn’t soft, drifting snow. It came down sharp, needling my cheeks like frozen pinpricks, like something meant to hurt. Or maybe it was the tears, turning cold against my skin, splitting me open the same way my heart already had.
It should have felt like any other Boston winter, low gray skies, fog pressing in, wind slicing clean through wool and bone.
Except my sister hadn’t been here for almost five years now, not since she was fourteen. I had been a mere sixteen-year-old who, in the span of one night, had lost the only family member I was close to.
After I went off to Harvard, I returned home every weekend despite knowing that I wasn’t wanted here. I returned home inhopes that Lily would magically be returned to us, but as months and even years went on, my hope dwindled.
I knew my parents’ certainly did. My father even had a tombstone made up, a burial plot bought, and a casket handmade. I couldn’t help but think he knew what had happened to Lily.
Until last weekend, when the police came to the door.
“Lily’s gone.” Those were the words offered by the lead detectives that showed up.
They would no longer search for Lily, declaring the closing of her missing persons case. The necklace I gave her the night she disappeared was the only thing left of her.
A shuddering breath left my lips, creating a white cloud in front of my face while I watched the only family I had left.
My parents.
They walked ahead of me, ignoring my presence just as they had for years, all the way up until this morning when my father barged into my bedroom and his voice came down like a whip.
“We’re burying your sister today. Be ready in ten minutes.”
And now that we were here, all I could do was watch him walk ahead of me with his head held high, ignoring me like he always did.
My father had never been loving or affectionate. At least not to me. If anything, he saw me as a thorn in his side. Since my sister’s disappearance, he hadn’t even attempted to conceal his contempt, his mental abuse taking a toll on me.
I mourned Lily, too. She was the only light in our fucked-up family, and she was gone, leaving me in Father’s darkness.
Throwing another glance at my parents, I noted their grim expressions. Father’s jaw was locked so tightly I thought his teeth might crack, while my mother stared straight ahead, white-knuckled hands folded in front of her.
The fresh snow crunched beneath our boots as we made our way through this empty graveyard, the eerie silence shattered only by my breath. Every beat of my heart sent waves of pain up and down my arms, but I had nobody to lean on. Nobody to blame but myself.
We came to a stop in front of a lone headstone with my sister’s name etched in polished black granite.
Lily Elora Freud. Beloved daughter.
Five words that said too little but meant everything. Lily was the daughter my parents adored; I was a nuisance. Lily should have lived; I should have died.
I reached up to grasp the charm around my neck. The necklace was simple, but the pendant was anything but, with the most unusual symbol of a black obsidian circle etched with a silver serpent consuming its own diamond tail.
It was an item I was always conflicted about because it was a gift from my father, but my sister had loved it so much that she always begged to wear it. And now, it was the only thing left of her. I’d gifted it to her on the day she disappeared, and after years of searching, it was all that had resurfaced.
