Chapter 4
Daniel reached Lily first. She stood at the top of the stairs, clutching the banister, her face pale in the dim light.
“I’m here,” I called, keeping my voice steady as I climbed toward her.
She hurried into my arms. I held her tight, feeling her small shoulders tremble against my chest. Below us, Daniel told Brenda to wait in the kitchen while he checked the front door.
“I don’t want to sleep here,” Lily whispered.
“You don’t have to.”
I helped her gather her pajamas and the little white sweater Daniel had carried at the wedding. She packed them herself, carefully, as if choosing what to bring could make the night feel less strange. By the time we came downstairs, Brenda was standing by the kitchen doorway, her coat folded over one arm.
“I can take her,” she said.
“No.” The word came out sharper than I meant it to. I softened my voice without changing my answer. “Emily’s expecting us.”
Brenda lowered her eyes, then nodded. She didn’t argue. When Daniel opened the door for us, she stepped aside, and I took Lily out to the car.
Emily answered on the first ring. She told us to come straight over and said Lily could have the guest room. I didn’t ask how she’d make it ready; the steadiness in her voice was enough. Once Lily was settled with a glass of water and Emily’s spare blanket, I kissed her forehead.
“Stay with Emily tonight. We’ll be back in the morning.”
“Are you going home?”
“Daniel and I need to look for something.”
She studied my face, then nodded. She didn’t ask me to promise there would be no more surprises. I was grateful.
When Daniel and I returned, the broken window was still a dark, ragged hole in the front of the house. We stayed away from it and went up to the attic, where the air smelled of cedar, dust, and old cardboard. Claire’s storage trunk sat under the eaves, its iron corners dulled with age.
Daniel lifted the lid. “I should have searched this before.”
“You didn’t know what we were looking for.”
“I knew she’d left something for Lily.”
His voice went quiet on Lily’s name. I reached for his hand, but he was already kneeling beside the trunk, sorting through a stack of folded blankets. I joined him. Beneath them lay a scatter of photographs, a small envelope, and a birthday card softened at the edges.
The pictures caught me off guard. Claire stood barefoot in a kitchen, laughing at someone outside the frame. In another, she held Lily as a baby, her cheek pressed to the child’s dark hair. Claire’s smile was open and unguarded. I’d built my knowledge of her from Daniel’s stories and the few keepsakes he’d kept, but the photographs made her feel suddenly close enough to miss.
I turned over the birthday card. In blue ink, Claire had written, To my big brother—still bossy, still useful, and still the only person I trust to fix a crooked shelf.
Daniel gave a short, startled laugh.
“She sent that every year,” he said. “Even after I told her I could fix shelves perfectly well.”
The laugh faded as he looked back into the trunk. I watched his face change, and my anger—the anger I’d carried since Gavin’s warning—shifted into something heavier. There had been a whole life between the handful of facts I knew and the empty space where Claire’s book had been.
Daniel lifted an old envelope. Inside was a worn recipe card, stained with a crescent of something yellow. The front held a recipe for lemon bars in compact, slanted handwriting.
“Claire’s?” I asked.
He nodded. “She used to bring these to the office.”
I touched the writing. One of the capital letters had a long, looping stroke that looked familiar. Then I saw it—the same small hook in the number seven as on the note Daniel had once shown me, a mark I’d noticed without understanding its importance.
I turned the card over.
Claire had written a line beneath the ingredients: The tide maps are in the bottom drawer. Not the cabinet at the office—the one Daniel brought home.
Daniel’s gaze snapped to mine.
“She hid something in my map chest?”
“Or wanted someone to think she did.”
He read the sentence again, his mouth tight. “Claire worked at the firm for years. Records support, mostly. She could get to files I rarely saw.”
“What files?”
“Project records. Reports.” He paused. “There was a coastal-housing report she found troubling. She said some of the dates didn’t match.”
He didn’t tell me what the report said. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe the words were already too dangerous to say in a house where someone had thrown a stone through our window.
“Did Gavin know she’d seen it?”
“I don’t know.” Daniel folded the card along its old crease, careful not to damage it. “But if Claire made a copy, she’d have known where to hide it.”
He led me downstairs to his study. The map chest stood against the wall, a broad, low cabinet with flat drawers made for rolled plans. Daniel had brought it home years earlier, when he left the firm. I’d seen it every day without thinking much about what it held.
He pulled open the top drawer. Old coastal maps lay inside, their blue lines faded and their corners curled. The next drawer held survey sheets. In the third, we found nothing but an empty folder and a layer of dust.
Daniel went to the bottom drawer and tugged. It didn’t move.
“Locked,” he said.
A chill prickled along my arms. “Do you have the key?”
He searched the small dish on his desk, then the drawer beside it. “I haven’t opened this in years.”
I crouched to look more closely. The brass lock was dark with age, but the metal around its keyhole gleamed in thin, fresh marks. Someone had worried at it recently, scraping away the old finish.
Daniel saw them, too. His face hardened.
May you like
We hadn’t found what Claire hid.
But someone else had looked for it—and had reached this drawer before us.
