Chapter 4 - The Photograph Was Real
The red backpack was missing.
The photograph wasn’t.
Ethan had apparently dropped it before Isabella dragged him out of the archive.
William found it beneath an old storage cabinet.
Three women stood outside a medical building.
Natalie.
A younger Isabella.
And a third woman neither William nor I recognized.
The date on the back was seven years earlier.
Three years before Natalie became ill.
William stared at it.
“This makes no sense.”
“Maybe they knew each other casually.”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because Isabella told me we’d never crossed paths.”
That still didn’t prove something sinister.
People forget acquaintances.
People hide awkward history.
Then William noticed the building behind them.
A fertility clinic.
Natalie and William had struggled to conceive for years.
Ethan was their only child.
William told me they eventually conceived after fertility treatment.
“What clinic?”
He named the one in the photograph.
My stomach tightened.
“Did Isabella know about that?”
“She knows now. Everyone close to us does.”
“Before you married?”
“Yes.”
“Did she ever say she’d been there?”
“No.”
The third woman in the photo had written something on the back.
For N + I — whatever happens, protect the little one.
William read it twice.
“N and I.”
Natalie and Isabella.
The little one.
Ethan.
Then William looked toward his sleeping son.
If Isabella had known Natalie years before William met her, why pretend otherwise?
And why had Natalie kept the photograph inside the backpack she intended Ethan to open someday?
That was when William admitted something else.
Natalie had left him a letter he had never opened.
Not because he couldn’t.
Because the envelope said:
For William only if something about Ethan’s records stops making sense.
May you like
For two years, nothing had.
Until tonight.
