“When did she die?”
“Three years ago.”
“How?”
Sadie’s face changed.
Not grief.
Fear.
“The police said it was an accident.”
Those words chilled me.
“What kind of accident?”
“Our house burned down.”
I stopped breathing.
Sadie continued.
“I was at a friend’s house. When I came home, everything was gone.”
The clipping in my hands suddenly felt impossibly heavy.
Two sisters.
Two mothers.
Two fires.
Twenty-six years apart.
“No,” I whispered.
“That’s when Christopher found me.”
“How?”
“He came to the group home six months later.”
“Why?”
“He said he saw the story about the fire and recognized my mother’s name.”
I stared at Christopher’s photograph.
The man beside Rebecca looked like my husband.
But not exactly the man I remembered meeting fifteen years earlier.
This Christopher was thinner.
Harder.
There was a scar near his eyebrow I had never noticed before.
Except—
I had.
Christopher always said he got it falling from a bicycle when he was twelve.
I pressed my fingers to my temples.
“What was he to Rebecca?”
Sadie hesitated.
“He protected her.”
“From who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sadie.”
“I don’t!”
She finally raised her voice.
Then immediately covered her mouth, glancing toward the hallway.
Tears filled her eyes.
“I asked him a hundred times. He wouldn’t tell me. He said knowing too much had already destroyed enough lives.”
I looked at the letter.
My name stared back at me.
Christopher’s handwriting.
I didn’t want to open it.
Once I did, there would be no possibility that Sadie had misunderstood him.
No chance that grief was twisting everything into something monstrous.
But I had spent fifteen years trusting Christopher.
If he had left me one final truth, I needed to hear it in his words.
I unfolded the letter.
Claire,
If you’re reading this, then I ran out of courage before I ran out of time.
I stopped.
My vision blurred.
Sadie sat beside me without speaking.
I continued.
There is no version of this story in which I deserve your forgiveness. I lied when we met. I lied on our first date. I lied when I asked you to marry me. And every morning I woke beside you, I told myself I would tell you tomorrow.
