Chapter 3: The Woman in the Photograph
Detective Hale was still at the table when I walked back into the room.
I set Marcus's phone down in front of him.
The photograph faced up.
"Someone sent this," I said.
"Twenty minutes ago.
No name.
No message.
Just this."
Hale picked up the phone.
He looked at it for a long time without speaking.
"Do you recognize the house in the background?"
"No."
"The woman?"
I had been asking myself that since the moment Marcus showed me.
The eyes.
The nose.
The particular way she held her shoulders — slightly forward, like she was always bracing for something.
"She looks like me," I said.
"Or like what I might look like if thirty years had gone differently."
Marcus was standing near the window.
He hadn't sat down since we came back in.
"Could it be her?" he asked.
"Could that actually be Nora?"
Hale set the phone down carefully.
"We're going to need to trace the number this came from.
And I want a copy of that image run through our systems." He looked at me.
"Is there anyone who might have known your sister was alive?
Anyone in the family who might have kept contact?"
I thought about my aunts.
My cousins.
The people who had been standing in that room with pink balloons while my daughter lay unconscious in a dumpster.
"My mother's sister," I said.
"Aunt Ruth.
She lived with us for a while when I was small.
She left when I was about eight — maybe nine.
My parents said they had a falling out.
I never knew what about."
"Do you have contact information for her?"
"No.
I haven't spoken to her in over twenty years."
Hale wrote something down.
"We'll find her."
He closed the folder and stood.
"In the meantime, I need you to stay somewhere that isn't your parents' house.
Is that possible?"
"We're at a hotel," Marcus said.
"We haven't gone back."
"Good.
Keep it that way." Hale picked up his jacket from the back of the chair.
"One more thing.
The dr*g found in Lily's system — it's not something you buy at a pharmacy.
It requires a prescription, and even then, the dosage she received would require medical knowledge to calculate for a child her size." He paused.
"Someone in your family either has that knowledge or has access to someone who does."
The door closed behind him.
Marcus and I stood in the silence he left.
"Your father," Marcus said finally.
"He worked in pharmaceutical sales for thirty years."
I already knew.
I had been thinking it since the doctor used the words I had to ask him to repeat.
"He would know exactly what to use," I said.
"And exactly how much."
Marcus sat down across from me.
He reached across the table and covered my hands with his.
"We need to talk about what we do next," he said.
"Not just for Nora.
For Lily.
For us.
Because whatever this is — it didn't start with Lily's birthday."
He was right.
I could feel it.
The shape of something enormous just beneath the surface of everything I thought I knew about my family.
"There's something else," I said.
"Something I didn't tell Hale yet."
Marcus waited.
"When I was about six — before Nora disappeared — I remember my parents arguing late one night.
I was on the stairs.
I couldn't hear everything, but I heard my father say one thing clearly." I looked at Marcus.
"He said, *she was never supposed to be yours.*"
Marcus went very still.
"I was six," I said.
"I didn't understand it.
I forgot about it for years.
But sitting here right now, looking at that photograph—"
My phone lit up on the table between us.
Unknown number.
The same one that had sent the photograph.
This time, it was a text.
May you like
Four words.
*She knows you're looking.*
