Chapter 5: What Second Chances Kept in the Back Room
The shop was smaller than I remembered.
Michael stood in the doorway for a moment, taking it in — the crowded racks, the smell of old fabric and cedar, the handwritten price tags.
Mr.
Harrison stepped in behind him.
I followed.
The woman at the counter looked up.
Gray hair, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead.
The same woman who had sold me the dress.
"We're closing in twenty minutes," she said pleasantly.
"I bought a dress here three weeks ago," I said.
"Dark blue.
Vintage cut.
Silver buttons."
Her expression shifted.
Not alarm — something more careful.
Recognition.
"I remember it."
"We need to know where it came from," Michael said.
"The estate sale.
We need the address."
She looked at the three of us.
Her eyes settled on Mr.
Harrison.
"Are you Thomas Harrison?" she asked.
He went very still.
"Yes."
She took off her glasses.
Set them on the counter.
"I was hoping someone would come in eventually." She turned and disappeared through a door behind the register.
Michael looked at me.
"She knows," he said quietly.
The woman came back carrying a manila folder.
She set it on the counter and opened it.
Inside was a receipt, a handwritten inventory list, and a photograph — color, recent — of a house.
"The estate sale was for a property on Dunmore Road," she said.
"The owner passed away in March.
No next of kin on record.
The county handled the sale." She slid the photograph across the counter.
"That's the house."
Mr.
Harrison picked it up.
His hand was steady but his breathing had changed.
"I know this house," he said.
"You've been there before?" Michael asked.
"No." He set the photograph down.
"But Eleanor described it to me once.
In the last phone call I ever had with her.
She said she was at a house on Dunmore Road.
She said she couldn't leave." He touched the edge of the photograph.
"That was thirty-one years ago.
I drove every road in this county looking for a Dunmore Road.
I couldn't find it."
"They renamed it," the woman said quietly.
"It used to be called Mill Trace Lane.
The county changed the name in 1997 when they redeveloped the area." She paused.
"I looked it up after the sale.
I had a feeling."
Michael turned to look out the shop window.
His reflection stared back at him from the dark glass.
"Who owned the house?" he asked.
"Before the county took it."
The woman checked her folder.
"The deed was in the name of a Raymond Aldrich."
Nobody spoke.
May you like
Michael's reflection didn't move.
"That's my father's name," he said.
