I knew that locket.
Not one like it.
That one.
A tiny dent marked the lower edge where I had dropped it on the kitchen floor when I was seven. The clasp had been repaired with a thin piece of wire because my mother had refused to throw it away.
And inside—
My hands shook so violently that I almost dropped it when Sadie placed it in my palm.
I opened the clasp.
There were two photographs inside.
One was of me as a little girl.
The other was of my mother.
My mother had been wearing that locket the night she died.
At least, that was what I had always been told.
I stared at Sadie.
“Where did you get this?”
She swallowed.
“Christopher gave it to me.”
A ringing filled my ears.
“No.”
“He said you’d recognize it.”
“No.”
“He said it was the only way you’d believe me.”
I stood so quickly that the chair beside my bed fell backward.
“My mother was buried with this.”
Sadie flinched.
“I know.”
The anger came before the grief.
It was hot and immediate, ripping through the numbness that had surrounded me since Christopher’s death.
“You know?”
She nodded.
“How could you possibly know?”
“Because Christopher told me.”
I laughed, but there was nothing amused in the sound.
Christopher had been dead less than twenty-four hours.
His toothbrush was still beside mine.
His shoes were still sitting in the hallway.
His coffee mug was still in the dishwasher.
And now a sixteen-year-old girl I barely knew was standing in my bedroom holding something that should have been in my mother’s grave.
“Tell me everything.”
Sadie looked toward the hallway.
“Mason and Paisley—”
“Are downstairs.”
“They shouldn’t hear this.”
“Then close the door.”
She did.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
Sadie remained standing.
For the first time since she had come into our home, she no longer looked like a nervous teenager waiting for permission to exist.
She looked terrified.
“Christopher wasn’t my father,” she said.
A strange relief passed through me.
I hated myself for feeling it.
“Then who was he to you?”
“He was the man who found me.”
