Beneath the date, in my mother’s unmistakable handwriting, were two names.
Hannah and Douglas.
I looked at Lucas.
Then at Douglas.
Then back at the photograph.
“What does this mean?”
Neither of them answered immediately.
“Lucas?”
His face tightened.
“My father didn’t find that photograph until eleven years ago.”
“Where?”
“In your mother’s house.”
I stared at him.
“My mother’s house?”
Douglas opened his eyes.
His breathing had become shallow, and for one terrifying moment I wondered whether the effort of telling me all of this was too much.
I leaned toward him.
“Douglas, you don’t have to—”
“Yes,” he whispered. “I do.”
Lucas pulled the visitor’s chair closer for me.
I sat, although I barely felt it beneath me.
Douglas’s hand searched across the blanket.
I took it.
His fingers were cold, but when they closed around mine, I remembered those same hands throwing pebbles at my bedroom window when we were seventeen because my mother had grounded me for sneaking home after midnight.
