So small.
So trusting.
So impossible.
“I lost seven years with you,” I said quietly. “I’m not losing her too.”
Lucas looked at Noah.
Some silent twin conversation passed between them.
Then Lucas slid something across the table.
A small key.
“Mama said to give you this only if you were stubborn.”
Despite everything, a broken laugh escaped me.
“She knew me well.”
Noah pointed to the key. “It opens the red box.”
“What red box?”
“At home,” Lucas said. “Under the floor.”
Holt stiffened behind me.
I closed my fingers around the key.
“Margaret will stay with you,” I said. “Security will be right outside. Nobody gets near you.”
Noah’s eyes filled with tears. “Promise?”
I leaned forward and kissed his forehead before I could overthink it.
Then Lucas’s.
“I promise.”
The drive to Long Island felt like moving through a nightmare built from headlights and memory.
Rain began before we crossed the bridge.
Of course it did.
Rain always seemed to arrive when my life was being rewritten.
Holt sat beside me in the back of the SUV, silent. I watched water slide down the tinted glass and remembered Claire barefoot in my kitchen, stealing coffee from my mug. Claire asleep with a book on her chest. Claire crying the night I proposed because, she said, she had never trusted happiness before me.
Had she been alone when the boys were born?
Had she whispered my name?
Had she hated me for not finding her?
The house was small, weather-beaten, and set back from a narrow road overlooking the gray churn of the bay. The blue front door hung half-open.
Police had not been called.
Holt had made sure of that.
His people moved through the rooms with quiet efficiency while I stood in the entrance hall, staring at signs of a life I should have shared.
Two small raincoats on hooks.
A height chart penciled onto the wall.
Lucas, age 5.
Noah, age 5.
Lucas, age 6.
Noah, age 6.
A third mark near the bottom, half-faded.
Baby A.