Radley had asked for them every month — send me pictures of Percy at the park, so I can keep memories for the boy — and Ellard had sent them gladly, dozens of them over the years, glad to be asked, glad to feel useful, glad that his son-in-law wanted a record of the grandson’s happy afternoons.

And they had never been for Radley at all.

They had been for this room.

For six years, every photograph Ellard took of Percy licking an ice cream cone had traveled from his phone to Radley to these damp wooden walls, to be the single thread of connection a captive mother had to her stolen child.

He had been, without knowing it, the one person keeping Sidonie alive in the dark — not with money, which had funded her prison, but with these, the pictures, the only mercy in six years of cruelty.

The cruelty of it doubled back on itself so many times he could hardly follow it: that his photographs had been both the instrument of Radley’s manipulation of Sidonie and the only thing that had kept her from despair.