Chapter 1 - The Paper Vanessa Wanted Buried With My Mother
Vanessa slammed the dog’s metal food bowl onto the concrete beside me hard enough to scatter kibble across the patio.
“Miss your dead mother that badly?” she said. “Eat off the floor with the dog.”
I was twenty-two years old, sitting beside the old kennel in my father’s backyard with my mother’s framed photograph against my chest. I had come outside because it was the only corner of the house Vanessa had not redesigned after she married my father. The kennel had belonged to Scout, the golden retriever my mother raised from a puppy. Scout had died the previous winter, but I still came out there when I wanted to remember the house as it had been before everything became Vanessa’s.
“Leave me alone,” I said.
Vanessa looked at the photograph. It showed my mother, Claire Reed, laughing in the backyard when I was twelve, one hand buried in Scout’s fur. Claire had died five years earlier after a long fight with breast cancer.
Vanessa bent down and snatched the frame from my hands.
“She’s dead, sweetheart. Stop worshiping the woman who left you nothing.”
“Give it back.”
She smiled, then threw it onto the patio.
The wooden frame hit first. The glass cracked safely across the concrete, away from my legs. I stared at it for half a second before dropping to my knees.
That was when a folded piece of paper slipped from behind the photograph.
Vanessa saw it too.
Her smile disappeared.
The paper had been folded into a narrow rectangle and sealed with a dark thumbprint pressed over the edge.
My mother’s thumbprint.
I knew that only because I had seen Claire seal birthday letters that way during the final year of her life. Chemotherapy had caused tremors in her right hand, and she started joking that a thumbprint was harder to mistake than her increasingly uneven signature.
I reached for the paper.
Vanessa lunged at the same time.
I got there first.
She grabbed my wrist.
“Give me that.”
Her fingers tightened.
“Why?”
“Because it isn’t yours.”
“It was behind my mother’s photograph.”
Her face changed.
Then she said the sentence that made everything else stop mattering.
“Your mother should’ve taken her secrets to the grave.”
I stared at her.
“What secrets?”
Vanessa realized what she had said.
She released my wrist slightly.
Then the back door opened.
My father stepped outside wearing his navy work jacket.
“Emma?”
I held up the folded paper.
Vanessa released me completely and stepped backward.
Dad’s eyes landed on the black thumbprint.
His face changed instantly.
“Where did you find that?”
“Behind Mom’s picture.”
Vanessa whispered, “David, don’t open it.”
My father looked directly at her.
Then at me.
For the first time since Claire died, I saw fear on his face that had nothing to do with grief.
He took the paper carefully, but he did not open it immediately.
“Dad?”
He swallowed.
“Your mother used this seal for things she didn’t want anyone else changing.”
Vanessa said, “Claire was sick. She wrote all kinds of things near the end.”
Dad looked at her.
“You told me there were no more sealed letters.”
Vanessa went completely still.
I looked between them.
“No more?”
That was when I understood this was not the first fingerprint-sealed paper my father had seen after my mother died.
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And Vanessa had apparently been the person who told him there were none left.
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