“She wasn’t hiding from you, Claire.

Not by choice.”

“I’ll decide what I believe,” I said.

“Of course.”

I rose and walked back inside, not because Lucas asked me to, but because somewhere beyond those doors sat a woman who remembered the childhood I thought I had buried.

PART 7

Miriam was looking at a photograph when I returned.

It showed a little girl in a yellow raincoat standing beside a bicycle with streamers on the handlebars.