Chapter 4: What He Kept in the Study
I didn't sleep that night.
I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house.
Dad's study light was on until past two in the morning.
I could see the thin line of yellow under my door from the hallway.
At two-fifteen, it went out.
I waited another twenty minutes.
Then I got up.
The study door wasn't locked.
It never had been — Dad always said he had nothing to hide in there.
Just old case files from work, tax documents, the kind of boring paperwork that nobody wanted to look at anyway.
I pushed the door open.
The desk was neat.
Too neat.
Like he'd straightened it recently.
I sat in his chair and opened the top drawer.
Pens.
A stapler.
A small notebook with nothing written in it.
I opened the second drawer.
Folders, all labeled in his handwriting.
I flipped through them.
Utility bills.
Insurance.
Car registration.
Then, in the back, behind the folders, my fingers touched something different.
A cardboard box, the kind that held index cards.
I pulled it out.
It wasn't index cards.
It was photographs.
I spread them on the desk carefully.
There were maybe thirty of them.
Some were old — printed on that slightly waxy paper from the nineties, the colors faded at the edges.
Some were newer, printed on regular photo paper.
The old ones were all of the same girl.
Short blue hair.
My face.
Not my face.
Her face.
Lena's face.
But the similarity was enough to make my hands unsteady.
In one photo she was laughing at something off-camera.
In another she was sitting on a porch step, squinting into the sun.
In a third she was holding a coffee cup with both hands, looking directly at the camera with an expression that was so familiar it felt like looking in a mirror.
Then I got to the newer photographs.
They were of me.
Candid shots.
Me walking out of school.
Me at the salon.
Me in the backyard.
Me at the grocery store with Mom.
Taken from a distance, through a car window or across a parking lot.
I didn't remember any of them being taken.
My throat closed.
I flipped to the last photograph in the box.
It was different from the others.
It was a printout, not a real photo — grainy, like it had been taken from security camera footage.
It showed a parking lot at night.
Two figures.
One of them was a man with his back to the camera.
The other was a girl with short bright hair, caught mid-turn, her face half-visible.
Someone had drawn a circle around the girl in red pen.
On the back of the printout, in handwriting I didn't recognize, were four words:
*This was the last one.*
I sat very still in my father's chair.
Then I heard a sound from the hallway.
Footsteps.
Slow.
Stopping just outside the study door.
I shoved everything back into the box.
My hands were shaking so badly I nearly knocked it off the desk.
I pushed it to the back of the drawer, closed it, and stood up just as the door opened.
Mom stood in the doorway in her robe, squinting against the dark.
"Cara?
What are you doing in here?"
"I couldn't sleep," I said.
"I was just — I was looking for a pen."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she looked at the desk.
Then back at me.
"Come to bed," she said softly.
"You look pale."
I followed her out.
She put her hand on my back as we walked down the hallway, the way she used to when I was small and had a bad dream.
I didn't tell her what I'd found.
But as I lay back down in the dark, one thought kept circling:
Dad had photographs of me taken without my knowledge.
Someone else had taken that last image of Lena.
And whoever had written those four words on the back of that printout — *this was the last one* — had sent it to my father.
Which meant someone out there knew exactly what had happened to her.
And my father had known too.
May you like
For how long, I didn't yet know.
But I was going to find out.
