I had not signed any of them.

The letter continued: She deserves to know what happened the night of the accident.

You told me you were protecting her.

You have turned protection into another kind of prison.

There was no surname below the signature, only an initial: M.

Joanna, I thought, was probably the woman Colton intended to marry when he was free of me.

But the letter called him her father.

My husband’s father had died before I met him, and Colton had never once mentioned having a daughter.

I turned to the last page.

A photograph had been clipped there, showing a young woman on the porch of a blue house.

Beside her stood a little girl holding an umbrella.

Across the back, someone had written: Joanna and Miriam, the summer before everything changed.

Nothing in that picture made sense.

Not yet.