CHAPTER ONE
The day Delilah’s mom disappeared, there was a wilted sunflower on the bathroom sink. Two years later, all that was left was a smudge of yellow, a stain she could only see in just the right light.
On that day, she’d woken up for school and stumbled into the tiny bathroom on the third floor in this dusty old house, still achy from the night before. She’d spent a full minute poking at the bags under her eyes before she’d noticed the brown butter petals hanging limp over the faucet.
It wasn’t necessarily odd for Indigo Cortez to leave bits and bobs around the house, soiled paintbrushes and rolls of washi tape trailing after her like breadcrumbs. But Delilah’s mother was an artist. She had a taste for color, for light. She liked things that felt alive.
Delilah had held that half-dead sunflower in her palm for only a second before tossing it in the trash. Such a shriveled thing couldn’t belong to her mother.
Now she knew to hold on to things a little tighter. A little longer.
There were no more sunflowers—dead or alive—in the last house on Old Fairview Lane, except for the obstinate ones across the road that refused to stop multiplying. It shouldn’t have annoyed Delilah as much as it did. Kansas was the Sunflower State. And in a town like Bishop, all wide open fields the color of corn silk even in the high heat of summer, it only made sense they continued to spread. Bishop was surrounded by them, a wall of aggressive yellow looming on the periphery with their empty, unreadable faces. They always seemed to be looking in, no matter which direction the sun faced. Delilah had always felt watched by them, but lately, something was different. It felt like they were listening, too.
At least she could keep them out of the house.
She stood at the kitchen window, watching the flowers lurch in the wind. It had started to pick up in the last hour, even though her phone said the winds wouldn’t come in until later that night. The app was wrong, though, like it often was about Bishop’s weather. The storm was already here. Delilah could feel it in the pea green sky hanging low overhead, the way static electricity in the air clung to her like a briar patch.
She bustled to the back of the house and yanked open the door to the storage closet. A riot of faded roof shingles, splintered patio furniture, oil cans and buckets rusted shut, and cardboard boxes—so many boxes—sat cluttering up the room. These were the things she had to choose from, a graveyard of broken things to prevent even more broken things. Flattened boxes to shore up the windows, shingles and old sheets and painter’s tarps to drape over sharp objects. The furniture to push in front of the doors when it was going to be a really bad one.
She stared at the boxes, contemplating. The last thing Delilah wanted to do was call all the girls before the weather was even a thing. She could already hear Whitney’s voice on the other end. Oh my god, Delilah, chill. Feel the breeze in the doorway as Jude marched past her, clearly annoyed. And Bo. Honestly, it didn’t matter what Delilah told Bo. She had never been one to listen.
They already thought she was overprotective and that she’d only gotten worse with time. They weren’t wrong, exactly. Once all the custody papers had been signed and their already-absent fathers had agreed to let them stay in Bishop, Delilah had been too grief-stricken to consider that maybe Whitney shouldn’t try to do her own stick-and-poke tattoo in the crease of her arm, or that Jude should have a curfew, or that Bo … well, that Bo was always angry for a good reason.
But time had hardened her—hardened them all in one way or another. And now Delilah knew better than to leave too many doors open. There were too many ways for things to get in.
And out.
Just as she was about to close the kitchen window, a door on the other side of the house swung open, making the frames on the walls rattle. Jude bustled in first, her long ponytail spilling over her hoodie.
“Where’s Whitney?” Delilah asked. “And leave—”
“—my sneakers at the door, I know.” Jude kicked off her dusty purple sneakers with a little more force than was necessary before she plopped on the couch. “She’s right behind me.”
Delilah waited. The front door hung wide open, the scuffed brass knob making a sh, sh, shhhh sound as it rubbed against the wallpaper. She dug her fingernails into her hand to keep herself from slamming it shut.
A second later, Whitney threw herself through the entranceway. Where her twin’s hair was always pulled back into a tight ponytail, Whitney’s was as wild as a windstorm. Her soft curls, which usually hung well past her shoulders, puffed out like a dandelion. It had always been easiest to see the difference between them during a storm. When the weather turned feral, Jude turned in on herself. She became smaller, paler. The muscles in her jaw clenched until the worst of it had passed. Whereas Whitney became more herself in the thick of it. Something lit up behind her endlessly brown eyes whenever the wind kicked up.
“Made it,” Whitney said, shoving the door closed behind her.
“Where’s Bo?” Delilah asked, tilting her head to look through the small glass pane in the door.
“Dunno,” said Jude, tapping the buttons on the remote. “Don’t we get some kind of basic channels? I want to check the weather.”
Whitney flopped onto the couch beside her sister, stretching her long legs out across Jude’s lap. “I already have the radar pulled up on my phone. Look.” She turned her phone toward them. The screen was blotted with red.
Delilah shifted to glance out the front window. The sunflowers were bent over now, their backs to the gray-green sky. The storm was getting worse. Her fingers twitched. A part of her knew she should just call Bo, tell her to get home quick. But the other part of her knew it wouldn’t matter if she did. Bo barely even texted her back nowadays. There was zero chance she’d answer a call.
Delilah turned. “Where did you see her last?”
“In town,” Whitney answered, not looking up from her phone. “She was talking to the event committee about the memorial.”
Beside her, Jude continued to flick through the channels, all of which were blurry and unwatchable. “Looks like the satellite dish is out,” she said, still absently tapping the buttons.
Delilah sighed. “Again? I’ll fix it later. And I didn’t know Bo was planning to do that,” she added casually. But secretly, Delilah knew better. Even though she had begged Bo to just let it go, she knew Bo wouldn’t listen. Bo would end up at the town hall to insert herself into planning the memorial anyway.
It wasn’t that Delilah hated the idea of Bishop hosting a memorial. In fact, she was the one who’d proposed the idea to the committee in that relentless, fever-pitch month after the girls had come home to their empty house, the front door swinging in the wind. But no one had listened back then. Their mothers were missing, but there was also the aftermath of the windstorm to deal with. Besides, missing women were as much a part of Bishop as the sunflowers and storms.
Growing up, it seemed like she’d attended some kind of haphazard memorial for women dead or missing at least once a year. Mrs. Rosen found cold in her pastel pink bathtub. Hailey Ramiro just up and gone, vanished from her bedroom in the middle of the night, not a trace of her left behind. The cops always came and investigated, like they were supposed to, but no one ever found anything other than a corpse that had died of natural causes or the stale air left behind in an empty house. Over time, the townsfolk had come to the conclusion that Bishop just wasn’t the kind of place that could satisfy hungry, restless women with sharp edges.
Well, that woman was a little too wild, they would say, when one was found facedown in the garden.
She was always talking about leaving one day anyway, they’d said when a woman vanished in the midst of her well-worn life.
She never did follow the rules, they’d whisper, when another had tucked herself into bed only to never wake up again.
Delilah’s stomach clenched whenever she let her mind wander in that direction. She knew those women had done nothing wrong—nothing to deserve that kind of fate—and there were no “rules” that would keep them alive and safe if followed. It was all rumors. Just people trying to make sense of this place.
Delilah knew that. And still.
There was a small part of her that believed if she could just keep them all in line, keep them smiling and obedient and whisper-quiet, maybe they wouldn’t come across as girls with sharp edges. Maybe they’d somehow be spared from a similar fate as the others.
But another had gone missing just six months ago, and that girl had done everything right. Eleanor Craft had dropped dead in front of the oak tree in her yard at only eighteen—the same age Delilah was now. She’d been a model student, the kind the teachers always praised in front of everyone else and used as an example. With her flame-red hair and the sparkle behind her eyes, she instantly warmed everyone she came into contact with.
There had been no memorial for her. Eleanor’s only living relative, her grandmother, hadn’t wanted one, so the townspeople went about the business of getting on with their lives, just as Delilah had after their mothers disappeared. She’d combed through her mother’s life insurance, cleaned out the bedrooms, and reorganized the pantry. This part had been Delilah’s memorial in those early days. She had figured out how to care for them all because there was no other option.
For the event committee—and Bo—to want to bring this all up again, to drag her back into her own head, was cruel. And it didn’t even make sense. Why a memorial and a big, flashy statue dedication now, two years too late? And why only to their mothers when there were so many missing and forgotten women?
“Got it!” Jude said, setting the remote in her lap. Through all the fuzz, Delilah could just barely make out a woman in a blazer, her hair pulled back into a tight bun.
“This is a … for all of central Kansas … hang on tight and … evacuation…”
The weatherperson’s words were punctuated with white noise as the image wobbled onscreen. Delilah frowned. Evacuation? She was pretty sure she’d heard that right. Bishop was smack dab in the center of the state, in the middle of Tornado Alley, and the girls had faced down a million windstorms—both with and without their mothers. They’d never attempted to evacuate once. No one in Bishop had. It was almost like it was understood: storms came and went, but townsfolk always stayed.
Except for when they didn’t.
Delilah looked out the window one more time. She tapped her fingers against the glass. No Bo. “We better start boarding up the house.”
Whitney swiped the remote from Jude’s lap and flicked off the TV. “I don’t know why we don’t use the storm cellar.”
“Bo,” Jude said softly, and they all settled into silent agreement.
They wouldn’t go hide in the underground cellar because of Bo. That had been the agreement for two years, even though Bo had never asked them to do it. They all understood that it might feel safer between the damp asphalt walls of the cellar for three of them, but to Bo it would feel as dangerous as being swept up in a storm.
So they went to work.
Delilah trekked back to the storage closet and grabbed the boxes. Jude pawed through the toolbox for duct tape, and Whitney shot through the hallways like a feral breeze, slamming doors and windows closed in her wake. Together they slapped cardboard over the windows, silver tape streaking across them. They moved clunky pieces of furniture in front of the windows, blotting out the slivers of gray-green sky that were still exposed, just in case the storm still managed to bust through the glass. Their mothers might not be here to protect them, but their old, nicked-up furniture was still here to soften the blow from shattered windows.
The last thing to do was cover up the small panel of stained glass in the front door. Delilah grabbed a sheet of cardboard that she’d stacked on her mother’s velvet reading chair and tugged at the roll of duct tape. As she began to place it on the window, she glanced outside.
Bo stood at the edge of the gravel driveway, her back to the house. The wind lashed at her honey blond hair so hard that it looked like freshly pitched hay. She was a fierce, tiny angel with a lopsided halo.
Delilah flung open the door and screamed, “Bo!” But the wind swallowed up her words before they reached the porch. She stepped outside, the door rattling behind her.
“Bo!”
This time, Bo heard. She slowly turned, her eyes glazed over. When she did, Delilah saw the puddle of blood at her feet, the sunflower the size of a dinner plate in her palm.
Delilah’s heart picked up speed. She tried again. “Bo! Get inside!”
Bo didn’t answer. Instead, her fist clenched around the flower until her fingertips turned white and every last petal dropped into the dust.
CHAPTER TWO
Bo held the sunflower in her hand, gently at first. And then, slowly, her fingers curled around the head. Her nails sank into the wet, seedy part in the center and the silky petals began to fall, one by one.
She liked the way it felt.
Bo had never really loved flowers—not like her mom had. Cori Wagner had wallpapered her tiny office with them. There had been delicate violets and full-blossomed daisies, ballet-pink lady’s slippers and vines of sweet peas tangled up in them all.
But then everything changed. Cori’s desk chair remained, worn and empty. And Bo painted the whole room navy blue.
“Bo!”
Copyright © 2023 by Andrea Hannah