Chapter 1 - THE PHOTOGRAPH
“Why do you have a picture of my mommy?”
Adrian Vale stopped in the middle of Bellhaven’s crowded stone street.
A tiny girl in a sapphire-blue princess dress tugged his black suit sleeve and held up the photograph he had dropped.
His breath vanished.
The woman in the picture was Claire.
His Claire.
The wife he had buried seven years ago.
“That woman was my wife,” Adrian said carefully. “She died.”
The girl shook her chestnut curls. “No. She’s my mommy.”
Church bells rang somewhere beyond the narrow buildings. Bicycles rattled over the cobblestones. Adrian heard none of it.
At forty-two, he was a man people feared. Six-foot-four. Broad shoulders. Steel-gray eyes. Tattoos disappearing beneath his rolled sleeves. Men twice his size lowered their voices when he entered a room.
This little girl only pointed at his face.
“You look grumpy,” she said.
“I’m not angry.”
“You should tell your eyebrows.”
One of Adrian’s guards turned away to hide a laugh.
Adrian crouched in front of her. “What’s your name?”
“Emma.”
“Emma what?”
“Just Emma.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“At home.”
His heart slammed against his ribs.
He remembered Claire’s coffin sinking into wet earth. He remembered standing beside her grave until the cemetery gates closed. He remembered waking every morning and reaching for a woman who no longer existed.
Now a child with Claire’s eyes was standing in front of him.
“Take me to her,” he said.
Emma narrowed her eyes. “Mommy says I can’t go anywhere with strangers.”
“I’ll follow you.”
She thought about that. “Okay.”
Her tiny hand wrapped around one of his tattooed fingers.
“Come on, Grumpy.”
Three streets later, Emma stopped at an ivy-covered house with blue shutters.
Adrian knew those shutters.
Claire had shown him a photograph of this house years ago. “My grandmother lived there,” she had told him.
Inside, Emma’s smile disappeared.
She grabbed his sleeve with both hands.
“Don’t open that door.”
At the end of the hallway stood an old wooden door secured by a brass lock.
“Why?”
“Mommy keeps the things from before in there.”
“Before what?”
“Before me.”
Emma reached into her dress pocket and opened her hand.
A silver key rested on her palm.
Adrian recognized it instantly.
He had given that key to Claire on their wedding night.
Then a floorboard creaked upstairs.
“Emma?”
Adrian knew that voice.
Emma smiled.
“That’s Mommy.”
The hallway door opened.
May you like
And Adrian saw the woman he had buried.
Cliffhanger: Claire stared at him as if he were the ghost.
