At an undisclosed location near the Delaware Water Gap, Olympia made dinner for everyone at the Tilley-Blandin Fortress. Within the hour, her parents would probably emerge from their office cocoon, where they were collaborating on a script for Reese Witherspoon’s production company. Her brother Hopper and his ex-wife Ingrid had disappeared somewhere on the property’s 10 acres. Her boyfriend Huey was leading a meditation session over Zoom for students in his high school math classes.

Her nephews Max and Alexis were tracking the rates of COVID-19 infection for a school project. Yesterday, they reported that the number of states below the magical infection rate number of 1.0 had decreased to 32. Two weeks earlier, in mid-September, 43 states and the District of Columbia had had a number above 1.0. Georgia still led all states with disastrous rate of 1.7. COVID-19 infection rates had been decreasing, but the Black Lives Matters protests and demonstration in June had reversed the progress, and the infection rate had begun to increase. Then the Fourth of July happened, and the rate exploded, and the death toll in the United States from the virus had risen to half a million since March.

The boys were racing to finish the project before dinner so that they could join in the Cards Against Humanity game over dessert. All the grownups agreed that the boys were far too young to play this game, but, under the rather grim circumstances, no one could come up with a good argument to exclude them. All but one of the Tilley-Blandin’s had gathered under the same roof and made coping almost bearable. Silver Tilley-Blandin, alone among immediate family, had decided not to join them.

They called themselves “The Almighty Eight,” living in the isolation of strict lockdown in the wealthy countryside of northeastern Pennsylvania. The last police incident within 20 miles of them had occurred in August. No one in their household knew the details, and no one wanted to know. Pennsylvania State Police were a looming presence, enforcing the PPE Act of 2020 and ensuring that citizens left their domiciles only to acquire food, drugs, or medical assistance. On one level, Ingrid’s presence was reassuring because she was a physician. However, once a week Olympia and Ingrid travelled to the Weis Market for curbside delivery of their groceries. On these trips, they counted the number of people they saw. On average, it was seven. Behind the required masks and goggles, they little resembled people.

Olympia was a teacher. Ingrid had prescribed some mother’s helper to deal with the stress of keeping her students engaged over Zoom. She was also an obsessive list maker. None of the Almighty Eight had been infected, but Olympia kept a running COVID-19 tally in her head:

• Number of her students infected: 18
• Number of her students dead: 8
• Number of student parents infected: 36
• Number of students’ parents dead: 21
• Number of friends infected: 56
• Number of friends dead: 33
• Number of relatives infected: 4
• Number of relatives dead: 1

It was Olympia’s turn to make what they all called “Quarantine Dinner.” She was preparing broiled salmon with garlic and pesto, corn on the cob, and cauliflower rice with asparagus and mushrooms mixed in. She was baking a cherry pie for dessert. It would be a serviceable dinner, but her mother had made it clear that she preferred Ingrid’s cooking. Olympia preferred Ingrid’s dinners, too.

Earlier in the day, Olympia had read a blog post called “Silver and Her Stimulus Check,” which described a phone conversation with her sister Silver, who lived by herself in Washington DC. Silver thinks her super-unimportant job with the Washington Post is enough justification to live in one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Silver sits in her duplex and has everything delivered to her. She won’t even let her boyfriend move in with her.  She could just as easily do that work here with the rest of the family and maybe help out with dinner and the Ingrid situation.

Silver, Olympia, and their older brother Hopper had grown up in Westbeth, a former General Electric plant near the Hudson River. Westbeth was filled with artists, arts organizations, and, in Olympia’s opinion “the monsters spawned by artists and art organizations.” The five of them crammed into three bedrooms. “It was hell,” she told her mother in a moment of clarity three years after moving out. “Our lives were bits of performance art. I could not take the chance of having one moment of banality to myself.” She was sure her mother was mentally taking notes for one of the screenplays she was well-paid to produce. About two seconds after her moment of clarity, she shivered at the thought of hearing those very words repeated by Chloe Grace Moritz. Probably Netflix, not theatrical release. Olympia never thought herself profound enough for the big screen. Her mother would tell her that she underestimated her appeal.

All the boys in her high school had crushes on Olympia. She was the Chloe Sevigny of her generation. Accidental charisma oozed out of every pore. A pale expression from her froze boys (and men) in their tracks. “Best ‘come hither’ look in the five boroughs,” exclaimed the author of an obscure Lower East Side arts blog, earning Olympia a mention on Page Six, which compared her to a young Catherine Deneuve (with purple hair). Fiona Apple was a friend of her mother’s, but quickly became a mentor to Olympia and Silver. “Make sure you get all your good stuff in before you’re 18,” Apple had told them. “Once you’re legal, all anyone will care about is your tits.” All of Hopper’s friends who were interested in girls were interested in her. However, she did not have a boyfriend until she got to college. “Too many knuckleheads with relentless boners,” she told Silver. “I cannot be serious about any boy when I myself am still so immature,” she told her mother.

The sisters had entered into their indeterminate twenties. Olympia was older than Silver by two years. She allowed Silver to call her “Oly.” She forced the additional two syllables on everyone else. The closeness they felt for each other as adults had been accentuated by the absence they felt during the college years that Silver had spent in Oregon, while Olympia had stayed in New York.

Since tweendom, they shared secrets with each other to which no one else was privy. The Tilley-Blandin Sisters Secret File. Every year, over pizza at John’s of Bleecker Street, they shared a single new secret, ranked it compared to previous years’ secrets, wrote them down, and put them in a safe place. When they were girls, they hid the secrets in Hopper’s room. Hopper had no idea that his sisters possessed secrets. Like most boys, he thought the lives of girls were an open book. When Olympia started college at Barnard, she opened up her own bank account and hid the secrets in a safe deposit box. When Silver went to Oregon, they would meet at John’s over winter break. After they had both moved to Washington DC, they moved their meetings to Comet Ping Pong on Connecticut Avenue and placed the secrets in a lockbox in Silver’s duplex.

Secret #5: While Olympia did not have a boyfriend in high school, she slept with three of her parents’ friends: a 52-year old painter, who was married and the father of two sons and a daughter, the latter of whom was Olympia’s history teacher; a 25-year old magazine writer who had profiled her parents’ marriage and become dangerously close to her mother; and a twice-divorced, childless 42-year old television comedy writer who could not take her seriously. None of the men could excite her sexually, but she was thrilled by the moral and legal complexities the assignations and enthralled by the pillow talk of men with imaginations.

Olympia chose to escape from Westbeth and her mother’s grip to study English at Barnard. [Editor’s note: Her mother had also graduated from Barnard with a degree in English.] Her freshman roommate was from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and had never talked to a woman with purple hair. By the end of that year, her roommate had started flying her freak flag. Piercings and tattoos in discreet locations that her parents would never discover. “More importantly,” her roommate said, “they don’t want to know. I think want to know that I am alive and in one piece They are sure the Upper West Side will be the death of me.”

This roommate, who has remained close to Olympia, graduated in three years, earned a law degree from a school in the Midwest, and joined the FBI. To protect her friend and, presumably national security, Olympia uses the pseudonym “Astrid” when telling stories about her. Besides Olympia, only Silver knows Astrid’s real name. During what Olympia described as “a particularly nasty semester,” Astrid may have been involved in some narco-terrorism, helped bury a corpse or three in New Jersey, slept with every member of Vampire Weekend, and made Dean’s List. Olympia chronicled the adventures of Astrid in a journal. In the back of her mind, she knows that Astrid will be the central character of her first novel. [Editor’s note: her mother’s first novel chronicled the adventures of a Barnard student.]

Secret #2: The “Astrid Journal” was hidden in the lockbox in Silver’s duplex. On the suggestion of Silver, who had read the journal. “Astrid probably knows that you have some stories about her written down,” Silver had said. “You don’t want your apartment ripped up after some search warrant is issued on some flimsy national security basis. That’s a bad way to ruin an otherwise serviceable friendship.”

For the past two months, Olympia and Silver had been communicating almost exclusively through text messages, with the rare phone call just to hear each other’s voices. “I spend eight hours a day on Zoom with students. JK. More like 12 hours. Not JK,” Olympia told her sister. “I can’t take it anymore.” The phone calls were dedicated to the subject of Silver’s erstwhile boyfriend, Louis Guidry and how Silver should spend the government stimulus checks for $1,200 she had been receiving. “Why don’t you buy a big-ass lava lamp for your crib?” Olympia had suggested. Louis was a law student at George Washington University. He wanted to move in with Silver, but she had demurred. Olympia and Huey had been hearing it from Louis, too. Silver was not pleased by a blog post “Louis Guidry Prevents Death by Nugent,” which described not only his successful intervention in a public police execution but his trials and tribulations with Silver.

She was worried about their annual meeting over pizza, which would take place as soon as she put the cherry pie in the oven to bake. She would eat frozen pizza and Zoom with Silver until the pie was done. She conceded to herself that she might nibble on the dinner she was preparing for everyone. She was worried about the secret she was going to share with Silver.

Last year, they had revealed what was subsequently ranked as Secret #3: They both had abortions on the same day, October 4, 2014.  

“You know how they say that almost no one gets pregnant when they are on the pill?” Silver asked Olympia at Comet Ping Pong. “It was junior year, and I was still with Lenny.”

“I remember you talking about Lenny,” Olympia said. “He never seemed real to me, like he was a meme.”

“That meme got me pregnant!” Silver hissed. “I was one of those ‘less than 1 percent’ women.”

“You never told me,” Olympia said.

“I am now,” she answered. “After I found out, I walked back to my room with the idea that I was going to jump off the roof. Only I was living in a two-story house converted into a dorm and I’d have to break into someone’s room to climb out onto a gable and then I’d probably just slip and fall and break my leg.”

“And you decided against that plan, I guess,” Olympia laughed.

“Laugh now, Oly. My life flashed in front of my eyes: dropping out of college, getting married to Lenny Wilson, finding a minimum wage job, and raising a child in Portland, Oregon.”

“I didn’t think you really liked Oregon that much,” Olympia said. “’A bunch of white people searching for golden four-leaf clovers,’ you told me.”

“That was Lenny,” Silver said. “Cute, but barely human like most boys his age. I did not view the idea of becoming a mother a good thing. I still cannot envision becoming a mother, much less a good one. I just couldn’t be responsible for another life. Could. Not. No. No. No. On October 4, 2014, I took charge of my body and my destiny. And I dumped Lenny. Two weeks later I upgraded to Winston. And then I dumped Winston when I moved back East.”

They were sharing the Steel Wills (tomato sauce, spinach, ricotta, kalamata olives, garlic, parmesan) and a pitcher of beer.

“Winston went home to Seattle to run his family’s business. If he survives COVID, I think he will become wealthy and find another woman to make him happy.”

“Hell ya!” Olympia shouted. “Here’s to ex-boyfriends.”

“And you know what happened to Lenny?” Silver said more than asked. “Lenny dropped out of Reed and went back to Portland. He lives with his parents and works part-time in a bike shop. He has grown a hipster beard, wears a fedora, and does random percussion with a bunch of Decemberists wannabes. He emails me news about the band a couple of times a year. He told me they are big in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington State. He has a girlfriend. I feel sorry for her.”

Olympia nodded her head. She finished the slice of pizza in front of her, drained the glass of beer, and pour another from their pitcher

“Silver, what I am about to tell you is stone-cold, absolute truth,” Olympia said. “No JK.”

“Truth about?”

“I had my abortion on the same day as you: October 4, 2014.”

Silver sat there stunned.

“It was Chasen Whitney.”

“I met him!” Silver shouted. “You were so in love with him, too.”

“Fiona told me never, ever fall in love with a boy who went to Columbia Law School, but I wouldn’t listen” Olympia said. “The pregnancy was an accident. He accused me trying to trap him into marrying him.”

“But you told me that you wanted to marry him, Oly.”

“Not like that,” Olympia said. “He told me to have an abortion or he would break things off. He told me he would pay for it, too.”

“And?”

“Well, he did pay for the abortion,” Olympia said. “And he kept the secret, but he broke up with me anyway. His words were that I was ‘too unreliable.’ He got married last month to Dabber Humphries. You know her. Apparently, in addition to everything else, she’s reliable.”

“Yeah, Dabber is reliable. Reliably dumb like most of the ‘smart set’,” Silver hissed. “Who knows about the aborted Whitney heir?”

“No one, Silver,” Olympia answered. “The thing about Chasen is that he knows what he wants. You can’t hate him for that, and he has been very discreet. And I don’t want anyone but you to know. No one. Not even mom. And certainly not Hopper.”

“I will keep your October 4, 2014, abortion a secret, and you will keep my October 4, 2014, abortion a secret,” Silver said. “We will add this story to the pantheon of the Tilley-Blandin Sisters Secret Files. And like all secrets in these files, we will carry these secrets to our graves.”

“To our graves!” they both shouted.

Before the pandemic, Olympia was living in an apartment in Tenleytown with Huey. They both taught at Sidwell Friends. Silver lived about four miles away in the duplex in Logan Circle. After Silver met Louis on Date Lab, they started to double date. Huey played piano and he began to sit in with Louis’ law school jazz band. They went on 10-mile runs together. Olympia began to feel as though the four of them were settling down. Huey had mentioned the idea of buying a house in Takoma Park, implying that her parents could finance the purchase as they had with Silver’s duplex.

As Olympia finished the lattice top pie crust, she reminded herself that she was scheduled to teach a late-night yoga class over Zoom for the students in her English classes.

Olympia arrived at Barnard as one of the “art kids,” but she left college in a state that Silver called “prissy.” She unleashed a new Olympia on Manhattan. She had stopped ingesting any form of illicit substance, stopped having sex with older men, stopped eating chocolate, and stopped biting her nails. She hired a personal trainer, which her mother subsidized. She founded a literary journal dedicated to publishing stories from women who had been victims of sexual assaults on college campuses, which her mother subsidized. She began singing in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church choir. She had dinner with her parents every Sunday night and allowed herself two glasses of pinot noir over the course of the evening. Page Six referred to her as “a young Grace Kelly, with an additional, sexy iciness.” She and Chasen Whitney became the “Golden Couple of the Upper West Side.”

Over the 2018 pizza, Olympia had asked Silver, “You know how people in their twenties are supposed to figure out what they are going to do with their lives or experience as much as they can or take all the gambles they can imagine?”

“Yes, I know,” Silver responded. “It’s from the speech that mom and dad gave to you, me, and Hopper the night before each of us graduated from college.”

“You see, Silver, I already knew what I wanted to do,” Olympia said. “I decided to become a serious person and do something useful with my life. That’s why I teach. Hopper wanted to be a college professor and settle down with his trophy wife and his perfect family and write his books and diddle his students. You, on the other hand, want to fuck around and pretend everything is copacetic.”

“As our friend Fiona would say, ‘I think your characterization of my goals is a bit overstated.’”

“Is it?” Olympia said. “You are fucking around as a pseudo-journalist. You don’t have a boyfriend. You don’t have any friends. What you have is a dog. You’re not even fucking around. You just are…Silver Tilley-Blandin. You are either the most interesting or least interesting character in one of our mother’s screenplays.”

“You say that as though it’s a bad thing,” Silver said. “You’re serious. Maybe I’m not, but the window of opportunity for me is still open.”

As Olympia put the cherry pie into the oven for the Tilley-Blandin Fortress dessert, she logged into Zoom and Silver for their annual pizza party. Olympia had a California Kitchen Margherita pizza. Silver has the Red Baron Classic Crust Supreme Pizza.

Olympia was shocked by her sister’s appearance. She had lost weight, and not in a good way. Her clothing was wrinkled. The Reed College t-shirt she wore boasted stains from different cuisines. She had not brushed her hair, and perhaps not washed it for a while. Her skin has lost its luster. She looked 10 years older than her actual age. Her eyes betrayed worry or perhaps fear.

“Silver, you look like shit,” Olympia said.

“And, Oly, you look radiant as always,” her sister responded. “Of course, you are living in the pastoral countryside and I am in a war zone bunker.”

“Any news about Ted Nugent?”

“Nope, still no sightings of Ted Nugent,” Silver reported. “It seems like half of the Post’s Slack is focused on the latest Ted Nugent rumors. President Voldemort is tweeting about him every day.”

“I think he’s had plastic surgery and changed his name.”

“I think he stowed away on David Geffen’s yacht.”

“OK, nice that we got the pleasantries out of the way,” Olympia said. “Some of our family members are not happy with what came out on that blog post.”

“Example?”

“Let me read this so I get it right. ‘Huey and I discussed buying freeze-dried food, some Kevlar body armor, and a Glock. JK. We already have a Glock. JK. No way we’d have a Glock near dad. He’d borrow it for some kind of Marina Abramovic kind of performance art piece. Something would go haywire, and we’d have to bury him at the Fortress.’”

“Did I get something wrong?” Silver asked. “Did you and Huey actually buy a Glock?”

“No! There is no Glock. There are no guns here,” Olympia responded. “There’s also the matter of this, too. ‘We all huddle in the corner by the fireplace, waiting for the coronavirus to get us like the boogeyman. It’s like we’re living in the first act of a Wes Craven movie.”

“My dear sister, I think most of the country feels pretty much the same way,” said Silver. “Maybe things were anxious in early summer, but after the Fourth of July, a lot of people soiled themselves. There’s no shame about this fear and trepidation any longer.”

“Fine, but did you have to talk about Hopper and his ex-wife, the mother of his children, resuming sexual relations?”

“Can you confirm for me that Hopper and Ingrid are fucking?” Silver asked. “Just asking for a friend.”

“OK, yes, Hopper and Ingrid are having sex,” Olympia responded. “But they aren’t a couple. It’s just…what are they supposed to do with themselves? You know Ingrid is a pediatrician and that she dumped her boyfriend in Chicago to keep her kids and their parents together. And now they are here. They are both healthy and they always had a chemistry. It’s just that Hopper has a singular superpower, which is his ability in normal circumstances to piss off Ingrid.”

“And his attraction to University of Chicago undergraduates.”

“Out here on the frontier, in the Tilley-Blandin Fortress, he has no opportunities for dalliance,” Olympia said. “But we are not exactly in normal circumstances, are we? If anything, whatever they are doing with each other helps keep the peace.”

“I’m just glad I don’t have to resort to such extraordinary measures on my end,” Silver said. “Every day it’s the same. Get up, yoga, breakfast, work, lunch, work, take Fiona for a walk, Zoom with Louis, dinner, work, read, Netflix, and bed. I am trying to watch everything involving Greta Gerwig and Reese Witherspoon. You know, in support of mom’s movie project. An introvert’s delight, with the specter of death by COVID-19 looming outside the door.”

“Yeah, but there was also the Death by Nugent you witnessed,” Olympia observed. “Not too often you get to be an eyewitness to a legal police execution on the streets of our nation’s capital. You weren’t the one who Meganed the guy, were you?”

“No, I did not call the police on the poor guy,” Silver said. “It happened so, so quickly.”

“Still, you’re surrounded by all this…violence and death.”

“Don’t hate me for saying this, but police executions are part of the new abnormal,” Silver said. “You get anesthetized by it all. I hardly felt anything when I heard that Fiona had died.”

“It’s like we’re just observing other people’s lives, hanging on to our own breath, and doing something other than living,” Olympia responded.

“I feel like neither of us has had the opportunity to create any more secrets.”

A moment too long passed.

“Isn’t that right, Oly?” Silver asked. “No new secrets for the Tilley-Blandin Sisters Secret Files?”

“Well…”

“Don’t ‘well’ me, sis. Spit it out!”

Silver looked at the image of her sister on the computer screen. No matter the circumstance, Olympia always possessed the appearance of regal grace, even if she were baking and had flour on her cheeks. Something had penetrated her defenses. She looked suddenly tired and defeated. Silver had seen her sister tired, but never defeated.

“I have to break up with Huey,” Olympia finally exhaled.

“How can you break up with Huey?” Silver shouted. “Huey is great. He’s smart and fun. And you can’t kick him out of the Tilley-Blandin Fortress in the middle of a pandemic! Where is he supposed to go? Where can he be safe?”

“Yes, exactly,” Olympia answered. “That’s why it’s a secret. I can’t break up with him.”

“Why would you want to break up with him?” Silver asked. “I thought that maybe you loved him.”

“I do love him, but mostly I admire him and respect him.”

“Are you still pining after Chasen Whitney?”

“That’s not it,” Silver said. “It was mom’s fault.”

“Mom’s fault?”

“Mom was in love with the idea of me getting married to Chasen and giving her grandchildren,” Olympia said. “She was just as heartbroken as me when Chasen broke things off. Then she started pushing me to find a replacement Chasen. She started introducing me to the best and brightest of her friends’ eligible sons. It was the Olympia Tilley-Blandin Sweepstakes. I hated it and started to resent her.”

“All well-documented in the family’s emotional archives,” Silver observed.

“And then I met Huey,” Olympia said.

In one of those “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” moments, Huey Wallace and Olympia Lillie-Blanton met at an engagement party for friends in Georgetown. Huey was a college classmate of the bride, and Lillie had slept with the father of the groom. He may have been the only man at the party who was not entirely white. Huey’s father was professor of African American studies at a small liberal arts college outside Philadelphia and his mother taught the novels of Victorian England at another small liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. He was their only child. At her father’s insistence, he was named after Huey Newton. Huey Newton Wallace. They were intent on having their son pursue a life of service. He liked numbers. At the time, Huey was teaching math at a school on the Main Line. He told dad jokes, but he possessed a mesmerizing voice, like that of a young James Earl Jones. He was handsome and athletic, and he could entertain at parties by playing ragtime piano. He brought his girlfriend to the party. Olympia met the girlfriend. Olympia liked the girlfriend. They stayed friends even after Olympia stole her boyfriend, because no one ever stayed mad at Olympia.

“Huey was as different from the Chasen mold as possible. He had no money. None of my friends knew him. He did not have a path to riches paved for him by his ancestors. His parents are college professors, for crying out loud! And…”

“And?”

“He is black,” Olympia whispered. “There, I said it. I started dating Huey because he was black. Mom would have to stop her assault on my marital status.”

“He’s not 100 percent black.”

“Silver, that’s so racist,” Olympia remarked.

“It worked, you know,” Silver answered.

“Sure it worked. Mom hasn’t bothered me about getting married ever since Huey came into the picture,” Olympia said. “His mother, on the other hand, is like a steam iron on the linen setting pressing down on his neck. Actually, she’s a lot like our mother. She’s a riot.”

“So, you’ve decided that Huey’s not the one.”

“Huey is so well-meaning and sincere and hard-working and honest,” Olympia said. “He will be a great husband for the right woman and the best father in his neighborhood. I am so goddamned bored. After we have sex, he lies next to me and talks about what he wants to do tomorrow. He talks about his students. He talks about growing up as a biracial kid. All that’s important, but I want him to talk about the stars. I want him to talk about the sunrise. I want him to recite poetry to me. I want him to inspire me to face another day in this forsaken land.”

Olympia continued talking until the cherry pie was set to come out of the oven. They agreed on adding a secret to the Lillie-Blanton Sisters Secret File. “Secret #1: Olympia has to break up with her boyfriend and kick him out of the house in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, possibly sending him to his death.” Silver recorded the secret and placed it in the lockbox. And then the Zoom was over.

Olympia rang the bell for dinner. It was a crystal bell one could imagine used to summon the servants in Downton Abbey. Slowly, the rest of the Tilley-Blandin’s convened for dinner. Her nephews arrived first and sat in their assigned seats. Their grandmother had assigned everyone seats. “It’s my house,” she announced at the first dinner, “and the least you can do is follow my seating pattern for dinner.” Hopper and Ingrid appeared together suddenly, as if they had just been teleported from another world. Her parents wandered in, and Olympia’s mother sat down next to Hopper. She was working on a screenplay based on Hopper’s book about children of artistic parents. Greta Gerwig was set to direct. “If we punch out the script by the end of October, Greta thinks we can start shooting in New Zealand in January,” her mother announced. “There’s no COVID in New Zealand anymore.” Dinner was to be served family style, but not until everyone was at the table. Finally, Olympia shouted, “Huey! Dinner! Now!” A few seconds later, Huey appeared and apologized that he had been talking to his mother on the phone. Huey’s mother was his standard – and very effective — out card.

During all the lively conversations in which Olympia did not participate, her family consumed all the salmon with garlic and pesto, corn on the cob, and cauliflower rice with asparagus and mushrooms. All the cherry pie was consumed. All the requisite compliments to the chef were proffered. Everyone knew that Ingrid’s dinner tomorrow would be superior, even Olympia. After dessert, they played Cards Against Humanity, watched two episodes of “Seinfeld” on Netflix, and then huddled in the corner by the fireplace, waiting for COVID-19 to get them like the boogeyman. Then everyone retired to their rooms. Olympia watched Hopper go upstairs to his room and Ingrid walk towards her room on the first floor. She told Huey that she was going to stay up for a few more minutes.

When she had heard everyone’s door close, she walked to a bookcase in the family room. She pulled several books out of the top shelf, revealing a hidden journal. It was a new journal having nothing to do with Astrid. It was a journal about Silver. Silver did not know about this journal. It was the only secret Olympia kept from her sister. She started a new entry.

“Silver will die alone. Not JK.”