Chapter 4 – The Bargain His Family Made

“I need to see the back of that photograph,” Richard said, and his voice had gone very quiet, the particular quiet of a man doing arithmetic he doesn’t want to finish.

Lily crouched, retrieved it with careful fingers, and turned it over before handing it to him. Faded ink, his own mother’s handwriting — a detail Richard recognized instantly and wished, violently, that he didn’t.

Paid. Handled. She won’t be back.

Beneath it, a date. Eleven months after the summer he’d spent at the lake house. Two months before Grace stopped answering his calls.

“That’s my mother’s writing,” he said, and looked up at Vivian, whose face had gone the color of the tablecloths.

“I don’t know what that means,” Vivian said quickly. “I’ve never seen that photograph before in my life.”

“I didn’t ask if you’d seen the photograph,” Richard said. “I asked why my mother’s handwriting is on the back of it, and why you look like you already knew the answer before I found it.”

Natalie Ashcroft — Richard’s sister, seated three tables back with a glass of wine frozen halfway to her lips — set the glass down with a hand that had begun visibly shaking. She had been twenty years old the summer their mother made a trip Natalie was never allowed to ask about, a trip that ended with a folder in their mother’s study Natalie had glimpsed once, years later, and been told firmly to forget.

“Richard,” Natalie said slowly, “I think I know where that folder still is.”