Robert loved numbers associated with baseball.
“What was your jersey number?”
Daniel blinked.
“What?”
“When you were a kid.”
“Twenty-four.”
Robert’s had been eleven.
I entered 2411.
Click.
The lock opened.
Inside was no ledger.
Only another photograph.
It showed Robert.
Samuel.
Evelyn.
And me.
My breath disappeared.
The photograph had been taken twenty-eight years ago.
I was standing in the background outside a restaurant.
Pregnant with my daughter, Claire.
I remembered that evening.
Robert had told me he needed to make a phone call.
According to the photograph, he had actually met Samuel and Evelyn in the alley beside the restaurant.
There was writing on the back.
MARGARET SAW US. SHE JUST DIDN’T KNOW WHAT SHE WAS SEEING.
Below it, Robert had written:
The ledger was never mine to hide. It belongs to the child who found it.
Daniel stared at the sentence.
“What child?”
Then my phone rang.
