It was an old question. I hadn't thought about Maria since I was ten, when I'd found out the hard way that imaginary friends came with lots of teasing.

"Of course." I'd been miserable for weeks, suddenly alone and even more of an outcast with the real children than before.

Tilda laughed. "No, no. I don't mean your invisible friend Maria. Do you remember the real Maria?"

I squinted at her. I'd known a handful of Marias—it was a fairly common name—but none that she would refer to like that.

Tilda sighed. "You never were quite all there," she said, leaning back against the wall. "You always used to try to convince me that I comforted you when we were little, that I'd climb in bed with you in that orphanage—the first one—and hold you. It didn't matter how many times I told you I didn't, you never believed me."

I frowned. "Because you did."

"I didn't."

Her smile confused me. "Why should I trust your version? You're not exactly sane, either." That much was clear from her dull eyes and the way she toyed with the gun in her hand. Then again, I couldn't blame her after everything.

"No. But I remember Maria."

Who the hell is Maria?

Beside me, Ciar let out a tiny breath, and with it one word. "No."

It wasn't the kind of no that meant stop. It was a no that meant she'd said something he didn't want to believe.

Her eyes slid to him, and I hated the way they looked at each other. Even though neither of them spoke, what passed between them was an entire conversation. There was a piece of him that would always belong only to her, a piece that no matter how much I looked like her, or spoke like her, or dressed like her, would always remain hers. It sliced me now like a steak knife to the heart.

"I don't understand," I said, partly out of frustration and partly to shatter their moment.

It didn't work. His eyes stayed on her as he murmured, "You were triplets."

"You were always so much smarter than people gave you credit for," she whispered.

My fingernails dug into my palms as I clenched my fists, surprised at the sudden ferocity in my veins. I craved their connection. I wanted to feel that, feel what they felt. I wanted to know him like that.

And then the word hit me. Triplets.

"Triplets?" I echoed, my voice breaking halfway through.

"Yeah." Tilda let her gaze linger on Ciar's face for a long moment before finally shifting it back to me. "Maria"—she said it with an air of disgust—"was lucky. She got adopted. Us?" She shook her head, then chuckled. "They must've walked into the orphanage and asked for the sanest one of the three."

My head spun. Maria wasn't just a figment of my imagination? I had another sister? There were three of us?

"She had it all," Tilda continued. "A family. Parents that loved her. That wanted her, that never gave her back. She was so normal."

"Tillie," Ciar croaked, "what did you do?"

She turned to him like a lioness defending her den. "She came here. Looking for me. She wanted to get to know me. Maybe we could have, if she'd come at a different time."

"Tillie..."

"It was her or me," she hissed. "I knew, the second I found out I was pregnant again, that I had to get out. Donovan wouldn't let me go unless he thought I was dead. So I made him believe."

"It was her body," he said. "It was her that I identified for the police. I told them she was you."

"You did everything you were supposed to."

"God dammit, Tillie!" His shout was loud enough to make me flinch, but she only blinked. "I watched you jump off that bridge, I watched you die, I"—his fingers pressed against the concrete until his nail beds turned white—"do you have any idea what it was like living with that? It wasn't a game!"

"No," she agreed, her voice dangerously low. "It was my life. Our lives."

"You called me," he said, completely shattered. "You called me to come watch you die, and I did. You let me believe that I didn't do enough before you jumped."

Somewhere between the cracks forming in my heart, two of Tilda's words kept repeating, an endless cycle.

Pregnant. Again.

"What happened to the baby?" I asked, finally untangling my tongue. "It was a girl, wasn't it? What happened to her?"

"I..." She turned her hands over in her lap, staring at them in silence for a second. "I knew, no matter how much I practiced, how many lessons I took, that jumping off the bridge was risky. I knew we might die. Or we might survive. I didn't think—"

She choked back a sudden sob, turning from ferocious to broken at an alarming rate.

She waved a hand toward her leg. "I didn't get the angle I wanted when I hit the water. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't"—a hiccup swallowed the next word—"the next few days were bad. She was gone by the end of the week."

No.

"I was going to name her Madison. Maddie."

She looked up at me, her cheeks slick and shiny with tears. She swiped at her face, and I dragged a hand across my own. We were mirrors again, just like when we were younger, crying for everything we had lost—her, a family, again; and me, years of my life fallen victim to the belief that she was dead. That she only existed inside me, as a dilapidated piece of my mind.

I wanted to call out to that piece now, ask her to come out and soothe the unbearable sting in my lungs and the dull ache that pulsed with every beat of my heart. Was that part even Tilda anymore? Maybe it was Maria.

Maria. One of my sisters was still dead, and the other had killed her.

Yet all I wanted was to hold her tight.

On hands and knees, I shuffled forward, reaching for her. It didn't matter if it had been years. We would never be strangers.

"Maisye—!"

Ciar's arm shot out, catching me by the shoulder.

"She's still a killer," he said, staring hard at her as he held me in place. "Maria? Nero? What about the night she"—he nodded at me, speaking to Tilda now—"almost got run over? That was you, wasn't it? And you slashed the tires? The starter relay?"

"I was just trying to scare you into leaving," she snapped, her voice scraping against her throat. "Nero was in on everything. He deserved what he got."

She choked on a sob, and so did I. She spoke of it like life was nothing, and I hated that I understood. It was all that we'd known for a long time. Our lives had meant nothing, over and over again. Her son's life, nothing. Her daughter's life.

Nothing.

I fell back beside Ciar, curling myself up into a ball on the floor. I couldn't look at her, because I wouldn't see the monster I knew she was. I only saw a mother trying to protect her children, the way no one had ever protected us, and if I said out loud that I got it, that she'd done exactly what I would have, then I was a monster too.

Ciar's free hand landed on my shoulder, squeezing, and I seized it. Across the room, Tilda watched us with glassy, unreadable eyes. Her harshly angled face, the thin press of her lips, the lines carved beside them...none of them were the Tilda I remembered.

We are monsters.

The wail of sirens in the distance snapped my head up, and Ciar's hand tightened involuntarily.

Tilda sighed. "They're here."

"They're going to find us," I said. I didn't know if I wanted it or not. We'd be caught, and so would Tilda. But the gun glinted from her palm, threatening not only me, but Ciar.

"Maybe." She finally stood, closing the conversation with one last swipe of her hand across her eyes. "But not before he does."

"Donovan?"

She nodded. "Because when I turned off your phone, they lost your location. He didn't."

She slipped it out of her pocket and paced to the window, as if he was already right outside. "It's a chip, installed inside the phone. He can see where you are, block calls from any number he wants...nothing that's a surprise, considering what he does."

All my unanswered calls to Mark, the last failed attempt to reach Clarissa...suddenly they made sense. It had all been Donovan, just like it had been when I'd tried to contact Tilda. Only that time, I hadn't been allowed in. Now, I wasn't allowed out.

"He's coming, you know." The window fogged up as she pressed her face up to the glass and breathed, "And that's exactly what I want."