For several seconds I could not breathe normally.
I called Hannah into the room.
She looked at the photograph and reached for my hand.
“Where could they have gotten that?” she asked.
I looked toward the shed.
One of Elise’s boxes had contained an album of prints from our early summers.
When we inspected it, the album was missing.
The missing photograph changed the feeling of the house.
A stranger had entered my family’s private memories and selected one image as though it were merely another instrument of negotiation.
I was angry at Meredith for her threats, but that anger became something sharper when I imagined her searching through Elise’s belongings.
Hannah watched me walk from room to room until she finally took the empty album shelf in both hands.
“Dad, stop,” she said.
“We can’t recover it by wearing a path in the floor.”
I sat on the edge of the sofa.
Elise had been a school librarian before becoming ill, and she kept handwritten notes behind photographs so that our daughter would know who the smiling people were when we were gone.
The missing album included the year Hannah learned to dive, the summer we adopted our old dog and the afternoon Elise painted the green pool fence.
Those were not bargaining chips.
They were a record of a life.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah whispered.
“For what?”
“For not coming sooner.”
“You didn’t know.”
She sat beside me and rested her head on my shoulder.
For a while we said nothing.
Then I told her something I had been avoiding since the funeral.
There were days I had considered selling the house.
The rooms could feel too large, and the pool sometimes seemed more like a responsibility than a comfort.
But I wanted the choice to be mine.
I did not want a developer, a neighbor or a stolen photograph deciding when I had to leave.
“You can still sell someday,” Hannah said.
“That’s not the same as surrendering now.”
I nodded.
We photographed the empty shelf, documented the missing album, and added the matter to the detective’s report.
That evening Tran called to say investigators had obtained a preservation request for relevant digital communications.
She made clear that the request was not a finding of guilt.
It simply sought to prevent records from disappearing while the facts were examined.
She asked whether I could identify the image copied in the envelope.
I described the album and the handwritten note I remembered seeing on its back.
