A folded note.
Only four sentences.
I recognized my father’s handwriting immediately.
Anna, if you are reading this, then something has made the past relevant again.
Claire was your sister.
You were too young to remember her.
And she did not disappear.
I sat on the floor until the grandfather clock in the hallway struck one.
Then I read the final sentence again.
Claire did not disappear.
Which meant someone in my family had lied to me for almost my entire life.
And Stephen, somehow, had stumbled into that lie before I ever knew it existed.
-END OF Chapter 1–
Part 2 of 5
I didn’t sleep.
At three in the morning, I was still sitting on the living-room rug surrounded by photographs and papers, trying to make the impossible fit into the history I knew.
I had been raised as an only child.
Not technically.
My mother had once miscarried before I was born, but there had never been another living child.
