Chapter 2 – The Photograph on the Marble Floor

Richard looked down out of reflex, the way anyone does when something lands at their feet, already forming the sentence he intended to say to his wife.

He never said it.

The photograph was faded at the corners, the color gone soft and yellow with age, but the woman in it was unmistakable — young, laughing, sunlight in her dark hair, a baby balanced on her hip in front of a lake house Richard hadn’t seen in twenty-six years. He knew that laugh. He had spent two years of his twenties trying, and failing, to forget it.

“Where,” he said, and his voice came out strange even to himself, “did you get this?”

Lily, one hand pressed to her stinging cheek, looked up at him with an expression that had nothing to do with fear of Vivian anymore. “It was my mother’s. She gave it to me before she died. She never told me who the man was supposed to be — she only said his name once, when I was old enough to ask, and then she never said it again.”

“What name,” Richard said, though some part of him already knew, had known from the moment he’d recognized the lake house.

“Richard,” Lily said. “She said his name was Richard.”

The ballroom, already silent from the slap, went silent in an entirely different way. Vivian’s raised hand, still hovering from the strike, slowly dropped to her side.

“That’s not possible,” Vivian said, but her voice had lost every ounce of the certainty it carried thirty seconds earlier.