“We will address that.”
Emily expected him to offer an apology or perhaps a job at another restaurant.
Instead, Gideon reached under the table and removed a photograph from his coat pocket.
It showed a little girl standing beside a yellow school bus in front of a small brick building.
The girl wore a red raincoat and held an enormous paper star.
Emily recognized the star before she recognized herself.
Her mother had helped her cut it from a cereal box when she was seven.
“Where did you get that?” Emily whispered.
Gideon studied her face.
“That’s why I came.”
The photograph was taken twenty years earlier, on the night a bus vanished near the abandoned town of Briar Hollow.
Emily had spent much of her adult life trying not to remember that night.
She remembered the bus, the rain, and her mother’s hand pulling her through a crowded shelter.
She remembered a boy named Peter who carried a green lunchbox and promised to return before morning.
She remembered adults shouting about a bridge.
After that, the memories broke apart.
Her mother, Nora Carter, had died three years ago without telling Emily everything that happened.
Gideon placed the photograph faceup between them.
“My wife took it,” he said.
“She spent twenty years looking for the little girl in the red coat.”
Emily stared at the paper star.
“Why?”
Gideon did not answer immediately.
He turned to Julian instead.
“Show her the letter.”
Julian hesitated.
“Dad, we should do this somewhere private.”
“The people who hid it preferred privacy too.”
The remark changed Julian’s expression.
He opened the blue folder and removed a sheet of writing paper, creased across its middle.
The handwriting belonged to Emily’s mother.
Emily knew it from birthday cards she could not bear to throw away.
The letter began with a sentence she had never expected to read.
“If someone from the Mercer family ever comes for my daughter, do not let them take her alone.”
Chapter Three: What Nora Carter Hid
Emily read the first sentence three times before she could make herself look up.
“That doesn’t sound like my mother,” she said.
Gideon nodded once.
“It sounded like a woman who was afraid.”
“She was afraid of everything after the accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident.”
The words struck Emily harder than Victor’s dismissal.
She looked toward Rosa, who had gone pale beside the coffee machine.
Julian closed the folder when a truck driver shifted to get a better view.
“Dad, not here.”
Gideon considered the room and then addressed Emily.
