Chapter 3: What the Photograph Said
I picked up the photograph.
My hands weren't steady.
I turned it over.
The handwriting on the back was small and careful, pressed hard into the paper like the person writing it had needed the pen to hold them up.
*If anything happens to me, take Sophie to Ryan.
He doesn't know she exists.
But she is his.
She has always been his.
Please don't let her disappear.*
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
"Whose handwriting is this?" My voice came out flat, like it belonged to someone else.
Daniel didn't answer immediately.
He crouched down to Sophie's level instead, said something soft to her that I couldn't hear, and she nodded.
He took her hand and walked her to the hallway, out of earshot.
My wife hadn't moved from the floor.
"Claire." I said her name like a question and a warning at the same time.
"Whose handwriting is this?"
She looked up at me.
Her eyes were swollen.
"Her mother's."
"Who is her mother?"
The silence stretched long enough that I heard Lily's bedroom door creak open down the hall.
Claire heard it too.
She pushed herself to her feet, crossed to the hallway door, and pulled it almost closed.
"Her name was Mara," Claire said.
"She was your girlfriend.
Before me."
I stared at her.
"I never had a girlfriend named Mara."
"You did.
You just didn't know her real name." Claire pressed her back against the wall.
"You knew her as Amy.
Amy Callahan.
You dated her for almost a year before we met.
She was using a different name because she was hiding from someone.
Her family.
It's complicated."
"Amy." The name surfaced slowly.
We'd dated the year I turned twenty-eight.
It had ended quietly — she'd simply stopped returning my calls one month, and I'd eventually stopped making them.
I'd assumed she'd moved on.
I'd moved on.
"Amy had a baby?"
"She had Sophie." Claire's voice dropped.
"She found out she was pregnant after you two ended.
She didn't tell you.
She raised Sophie alone for almost four years." She paused.
"And then she got sick."
The word landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
"How sick?"
Claire looked at the floor.
"She didn't make it, Ryan.
She passed away seven weeks ago."
Seven weeks.
Sophie had been inside our walls for four months.
The numbers didn't line up.
"Then who brought Sophie here?" I said.
"Who put a child inside the walls of my house?"
Claire's jaw tightened.
She looked toward the hallway.
May you like
"Ask your brother," she said.
"He's the one who built the passage."
