My chest tightened.
The first time I saw you, you were eight years old.
I dropped the letter.
Sadie caught it before it reached the floor.
“No.”
A memory flashed through me.
Police lights.
Rain on pavement.
Smoke.
A teenage boy standing beyond the tape.
I snatched the letter back.
I was seventeen when your house burned. Rebecca had contacted me two days earlier. She said something was going to happen to your mother.
I knew Rebecca through my father.
That sentence meant nothing.
Then everything.
My hands shook harder.
My father was Detective Thomas Hale.
The name detonated somewhere inside me.
Thomas Hale.
I knew that name.
Everyone in my hometown knew it.
Detective Hale had investigated my mother’s death.
He had been the man who told my father the fire was accidental.
He had testified that faulty wiring started it.
Christopher’s father.
I kept reading.
My father was the detective who closed your mother’s case.
He knew it wasn’t an accident.
My stomach turned.
“Christopher’s father murdered my mother?”
Sadie quickly shook her head.
“Keep reading.”
I forced myself.
I spent years believing my father had covered up the fire. I hated him for it. Rebecca hated him too.
But eventually I discovered something worse.
He wasn’t protecting whoever started the fire.
He was protecting you.
I lowered the page.
“Protecting me?”
Sadie whispered, “That’s what Christopher said.”
I returned to the letter.
Claire, your mother did not die in that house.
I froze.
The room disappeared.
My mother did not die in that house.
I read the sentence again.
