Chapter 6: What Dad Was Really Doing
I went home that afternoon and acted normal.
It was the hardest thing I had ever done.
I sat at the dinner table and answered questions about school and ate the pasta Mom had made and watched my father cut his food into small, even pieces the way he always did, and I tried to understand how this man — this ordinary, careful, quiet man — had been living a second life inside the first one for eighteen years.
"You're quiet tonight," Mom said, looking at me.
"Tired," I said.
"Long day."
Dad glanced up.
Our eyes met for just a second.
He looked away first.
After dinner I helped clear the table and then said I had homework.
Upstairs, I sat on my bed and called Ruth back.
"I need to know everything," I said.
"From the beginning."
She told me.
Lena had been twenty-two when she disappeared.
She and Ruth had shared an apartment two towns over, both of them working entry-level jobs, both of them saving money to go back to school.
Lena had been seeing someone — a man Ruth had only met twice.
He was older.
He had money.
He made Lena feel special, Ruth said, and then, in the same breath, she said: he made Lena feel small.
"Did she ever say his name?" I asked.
"She called him Daniel," Ruth said.
"I don't know if that was real."
"Did you tell the police?"
"Of course.
They looked into it.
They couldn't find anyone matching the description with that name who had any connection to her.
He was careful." Ruth's voice went flat.
"He was very careful."
"What did my father find last week?
You said something new."
"He didn't tell me the details.
He said he'd been following a financial trail — something to do with a property.
He said Lena's name was connected to a deed, or a transfer, something legal.
He said it pointed to a location."
"What location?"
"He wouldn't say." She paused.
"Cara, I need you to understand something.
If your father went to that location alone—"
"He wouldn't do that."
"He might," Ruth said quietly.
"He's been waiting eighteen years.
When people wait that long, they stop being careful."
I thought about the photographs in the box.
The candid shots of me through car windows.
The printout with the red circle.
The four words on the back.
*This was the last one.*
"Ruth," I said.
"The photograph.
The one from the security camera.
Who sent that to my father?"
A long pause.
"I did," she said.
"I found it two years ago in a box of things the police had returned to Lena's family.
Her mother had kept everything.
When she passed away last spring, I helped clear the apartment.
That photo was in an envelope at the bottom of a drawer.
No label.
No explanation."
"So you sent it to Dad."
"I thought he should have it."
"Did you look into who the man in the photo was?"
"I tried," Ruth said.
"The image was too low quality.
But your father — your father recognized something.
He called me the day he received it and he said, 'I know this parking lot.' He said he'd been there before.
With Lena.
Years ago, before she disappeared.
He said she'd taken him there once to show him where she worked."
I stood up from my bed.
"Where she worked," I repeated.
"So the parking lot is connected to a business."
"Yes."
"And that's where he went."
Ruth didn't answer.
May you like
She didn't need to.
I was already moving toward the door.
