Not a day passed that Helen didn't think of Emily. Having four daughters had done that to her—brought it all back. It wasn't as if she'd ever exactly tried to escape what'd happened, not consciously, anyway. Not like the others had. But as her girls grew, as they'd encountered their own ups and downs with peers and one another, their mother had found, at the most inconvenient or unexpected moments, her mind returning to the more unsettling parts of her youth.

There'd been the five of them that night: Helen, Anjulie, Danielle, Joanna, and Emily. What the occasion had been, Helen could no longer recall; they had sleepovers all the time. It wasn't anything new except that Anjulie was something of a novelty. They hadn't known her well, since she'd gone to some sort of language immersion school up through seventh grade and only recently transferred to their small private school. She could speak French, and they'd played around with that for some time, making her translate dirty words and phrases with their crushes' names sprinkled in. Anjulie had been interesting, Helen reflected. On dress-down days, when they hadn't had to wear their uniforms, she'd worn cool dark clothes, and her mother had let her wear strange makeup—black around her eyes, maroon or green on her fingernails—which sometimes got her in trouble with the teachers. Helen's parents hadn't allowed makeup until she was sixteen, and though she'd occasionally sneaked into the school bathroom to borrow some glitter or eyeshadow from the others, she'd usually listened to her mother and father.

Helen had been a good girl. Mostly. And she tried to be good now, for her daughters, to set an example. Still, the memories haunted her, and sometimes they caused her to become a little irrational.

When she'd found that Ouija board, for example, she'd flipped out, grounded all four of her girls, and told them they'd need to go to confession. That was where they were, now, waiting in line outside the confessional. Playing with occult objects was a sin! she'd told them, and, according to the catechism, it technically was. The aspiring good little Catholic girl in Helen attempted to convince herself that the sin of it was the root of her concern, but standing there in line with her daughters, she was acutely aware of her own hypocrisy. It wasn't the notion of sin that bothered her; it was the chance that playing with seemingly innocuous mystical objects could result in perilous consequences.

"Stop, Mabel!"

"You stop it!"

Helen darted a pointed glance at the twins, who were whisper-arguing, bumping each other's shoulders in some sort of duel. The moment they caught sight of their mother's expression, they stopped bickering and looked everywhere but at her. Autumn was next in line, and Junie was currently in the confessional. When they'd arrived, the little red light had been on, indicating the priest was waiting inside, and Helen's second daughter had requested to go in first. She'd been in there for several minutes.

Nobody else was in the church except for a few elderly people sitting near the front in silence, the airy, open space of the building ringing with small, indistinguishable sounds. Devotion candles flickered along the sides of the aisles in shadowy recesses; the afternoon sunlight dappled one side of the church with reds and blues from the stained glass windows; the far-away voices of a practicing choir hummed almost just beneath the silence. It should've been peaceful, but Helen actually hated being there.

She didn't believe any of it—religion. Oh, she wanted to. As a child, she'd been the most studious and pious of all her siblings, actually participated in catechism class at school, at Mass knelt when she was supposed to and stood when she was supposed to and sang along to all the hymns while the other students picked their nails and told secrets. She'd annoyed her classmates by answering all the questions about the New Testament and volunteering to do the readings and nagging their misbehaviors. It'd been a miracle she'd even had friends, being the goody-two-shoes she was. Joanna and Danielle and Emily had kept her around, even as they'd begun doing grown-up things like shaving their legs and coordinating their bras with their underwear. Maybe they'd felt sorry for her, or maybe it was that they'd known each other so long they just didn't know how to get rid of her, but whatever the reason, once Emily had gone, disillusionment had hit Helen, hard; the only good that had come from it all was that it'd forced her to grow up, too.

"What is she doing in there?" Autumn spun about and hissed at her mother, shaking Helen from her thoughts.

Juniper had been in the confessional for nearly ten minutes, which for a fourteen-year-old was a rather long time. Slip in, rattle off a quick list of banal sins, and say an Act of Contrition—the whole thing typically took about three minutes, particularly for a young person who wanted to get the humiliating act over with as quickly as possible. On occasion, an elderly person would take ages in the confessional, probably sensing life drawing to a close and frantic for some sort of soul purge, and there was one particular man the church community whispered used the confessional as his therapy; God forbid you end up in line behind him! Might as well go home and try another day. But Father was otherwise assembly-line efficient: in and out, in and out—the soul-cleansing equivalent of a car wash.

Clicking her tongue and quickly biting her lip at the unexpected volume of it, Helen took a few quiet steps forward, leaned toward the closed door, and listened. The soft voice of her daughter murmured intermittently, indecipherable yet definite. Junie was definitely in there, and she was definitely still talking.

Helen turned back toward her oldest daughter and shrugged, eliciting a caustic eye-roll. Then she turned her attention to the younger two and suggested they take a seat in the nearest pew. Autumn reminded her mother of Danielle, the only one of her three old friends she'd recently spoken with—fiery, quick-to-anger, somewhat entitled as the eldest (or, in Danielle's case, as virtually an only child). Oh, poor Danielle, Helen reflected, considering the conversations they'd had over the past week. They hadn't talked in so long, and yet Danielle had turned to Helen in her new-mother desperation. Perhaps she was right to do so; after all, Helen had raised numerous children from infancy, appeared successful enough at it according to her social media. Of course, the reality was never quite in conjunction with the surreality of the internet. The curated images of her smiling family members, her daughters happy and cooperative, took hours to take and tweak and caption and post, and more often than not in all the moments in between, the girls were arguing or staring at a screen.

Danielle would be better off finding a new mothers' group; Helen had suggested as much. Why, she hadn't diapered or spent an all-nighter with an infant in years, hadn't breastfed at all (having been uncomfortable using her body in that manner), and even though she'd talked as confidently as if she'd written a parenting book, Helen didn't know how to help Danielle any more than she knew how she'd managed and was still managing to keep her own kids from killing each other.

Parenting wasn't something someone ever quite figured out; there were far too many external players just waiting to either intentionally or unwittingly interact. There was so little a mother could really do. After all, Emily's parents had been the nicest people on the planet, and look what'd happened to their daughter.

Helen shivered. She didn't want to think of it. Twenty-two years had passed; why was it bothering her so much again, now? But she knew. That Ouija board had dragged it back up again.

"Damnit," she swore suddenly, causing Autumn to gape. Helen felt a flicker of remorse, considering her location and the fact that she was supposed to set an example, but her need for distraction overruled her guilt. "What in God's name is Juniper talking about in there?" She had half a mind to throw open the door, but she held back, instead put up a tentative hand to knock gently, even then hesitating. Did one do such a thing? Interrupt a confession? She'd never seen it done, but this was her daughter, and there was no way Junie had done anything that warranted a fifteen-minute confession.

But Helen's conscience tightened its hold. It just seemed . . . wrong, to interrupt. Her daughter was certainly conversing in there, though only God knew what she was conversing about. Two more minutes, the woman thought, looking at her phone. She'd give the girl two minutes, and then she'd knock.

"Mom, I told Kara I'd meet her at the pool at noon. Can't you just tell her to—"

"Shh!" Helen hissed. "Hush. We're in a church."

Miffed, Autumn moped off to join the twins, and Helen chose not to reflect on her own insincerity. She watched her phone, waited for that two minutes to pass, internally praying that she wouldn't have to do what she'd promised herself she'd do, and lo and behold, just as the designated one-hundred-and-twenty seconds were up, the door clicked open, and out stepped Juniper, as diffident as ever.

Without a glance at her mother, the girl walked right by and headed toward the opposite side of the church, sliding into an empty pew and sitting as if nothing at all had happened.

Left standing alone, Helen knew she should force her other daughters in there next, but a certain curiosity overcame her; she wanted to know what'd been going on, why Junie had taken so bloody long. Perhaps there was a visiting priest, someone not as expeditious as Father, and if that were the case, she'd take the others home and come back another day (because she'd have to come back; she'd set the punishment, and reneging would weaken her authority (and authority with teenagers was such a fragile thing)).

Helen pushed the confessional door inward, slipped inside the incommodious room, and gently shut herself in. A few steps in front of her was a kneeler, and beyond that was a filmy screen behind which the priest sat. Ahead and to the left was a chair, should she wish to speak with Father face-to-face, but Helen never did that. She hated the thought of looking at a priest and discussing her failings, particularly as a woman—how was she supposed to report so-called sins of the flesh like lust and masturbation to a man? The sheer awkwardness of it, the idea that a male was sitting there, soaking it all in, judging her . . . and yet, she never told her daughters her reservations. No, the least she could do for them was allow them to believe in it all, give them the faith she herself struggled to find. But for her own confessions, she'd stick to the small stuff: impatience with her husband, severity with her daughters, gossiping, swearing, that sort of thing. And she'd keep that filmy screen between them. Even if Father could guess who she was, the screen offered a façade of anonymity.

"Bless me, for I have sinned," Helen began, reciting the perfunctory greeting, "my last confession was a few months ago. Since then, my sins have been . . ." and off she went. She'd confessed some variation of the same sins since she'd first started doing all this, way back as a child, adding a few new ones as she'd expanded her relationships and life experiences. But it was always the same—hasty actions, unkind words. Put them in a blender with a few names, and she had it all worked out. Nevermind the actual dark secrets, the immoralities that really preyed upon her. Discussing such things meant acknowledging their existence, and Helen was in no way going to tell a priest her deepest shames, even if other people felt comfortable doing that.

Her litany complete, Helen waited for the priest's response, for the clip of advice, the number and name of the prayers she'd need to say for penance—that sort of thing—but when enough silence had passed for the gap to constitute awkwardness, the woman cautiously pushed, questioned Father's hearing, her own volume and, at last, got up to peek around the screen.

Seconds later, in a cloud of consternation, Helen hurried into the pew next to her second child.

"Juniper Mae," she insisted, "look at me."

Junie turned an innocent, perplexed face toward her mother.

"Was Father in the confessional with you?"

"What?"

"Father Rolfe. Was he in there?"

The girl pulled her lips inward, lowered her eyes, and shook her head.

"Were you on your phone?"

"I don't even have my phone. It's at home."

Helen huffed, angry, and said without even trying to soften her voice, "Then who the hell were you talking to?"

Meeting her mother's eye, absolute sincerity eliminating any shade of duplicity, Juniper replied, "Just my friend, mom. My new friend."