The first thing inside was a photograph.
She pulled it out carefully and stared at it with such immediate confusion that for a second she thought it might be someone else. But it wasn’t.
It was her.
In the photo, she stood in the Miller backyard in the pale gold light of morning, one hand holding a watering hose, the other pushing damp hair off her forehead. She wore jeans and an old gray T-shirt with paint smudges on the sleeve. Her face was turned slightly toward the flowerbeds, and there was a faint smile on her mouth—small, unguarded, real.
Olivia had never seen that photo before. She had never even known anyone had taken it.
The woman in the picture looked peaceful. Not happy exactly, but calm in a way Olivia no longer recognized in herself.
Cared for, her mind whispered before she could stop it.
That thought broke something in her chest.
Because no one had looked at her in that house as if she were worth preserving in a photograph. No one had looked at her and seen a moment worth keeping.
Except someone had.
Olivia lowered the photo into her lap and reached back into the envelope with trembling fingers. Beneath it was a folded letter written on lined paper. She knew the handwriting immediately.
Walter.
The letters were square and steady, the handwriting of a man who measured every word before letting it live on a page. Olivia unfolded the sheet carefully, suddenly afraid of what it might say.
Then she began to read.
“Olivia, if you are reading this, it means you left that house with less than you deserved, and I can no longer pretend silence is peace.”
The world around her seemed to tilt.
She sat down hard on the curb because her knees would not support her anymore. The edge of the concrete bit into the backs of her legs through her dress, but she barely felt it.
Her eyes moved over the next lines.
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