“Rosalind.”

She stared at me like a woman watching a ghost walk out of the shadows.

“It cannot be,” she breathed.

“I have been asking myself the same thing for six years,” I choked out.

She pressed her lips together and looked down at the two boys pressed against her, and then back up at me, and her face was a terrible mixture of grief and caution and something that might have been the very last flicker of a hope she had given up long ago.

“Christopher,” she whispered, and her voice was shaking so hard the word nearly came apart.