It was a photograph of me in Mom’s blue dress.
I was eighteen again, standing at the bottom of our staircase with my hands clasped in front of me, waiting for Dad to say we were leaving for the banquet. I remembered that night so clearly I could almost feel the dress against my knees.
But I had never known anyone took a picture.
On the back, in handwriting I didn’t recognize, were five words:
She looks just like her mother.
Beneath them was a date. The day after the banquet.
“Who wrote this?” I asked.
Dad glanced toward the living room, where my husband and children were waiting beside a half-cut birthday cake.
“Can we sit down?”
“No. Tell me whose handwriting this is.”
He gripped the edge of the box. “His name was Daniel Mercer.”
The name meant nothing to me. I turned the photograph over again. In one corner, a small section had been cut away, leaving a jagged white edge beside my shoulder.
“Why did he have a picture of me?”
Dad shut his eyes.
“Because he took it.”
I looked up at him. “He was in our house?”
“No. Across the street.” Dad’s voice was barely audible. “I found it in an envelope on the porch the next morning.”
A chill moved through me. I dug beneath the photograph and found more envelopes, tied together with a faded red ribbon. The first contained a clipping from my high school’s honor roll. My name had been circled in black ink.
The next held a photograph of me walking home from school.
The next showed me through our kitchen window.
I dropped it.
“Dad.”
“I know.”
“Who was he?”
Dad’s gaze fell to the floor. “Someone your mother knew before she married me.”
From inside the house came Lily’s voice. “Emma? Is everything okay?”
I couldn’t answer. I was staring at the kitchen photograph, at thirteen-year-old me standing at the sink, unaware of the camera outside.
Dad picked it up by the edges and put it back in the box.
“He started sending those a few weeks after your mother died. At first, I thought he wanted money. Then I realized he wanted to be near you.”
“Why me?”
Dad swallowed. “He said you reminded him of her.”
I thought of every company dinner, every wedding, every party I’d watched them leave for. “So you took Lily out and left me alone in that house?”
“I told myself he was following us,” Dad said. “I thought if you stayed home, he wouldn’t know where you were.”
“You left me where he already knew I lived.”
The words seemed to strike him harder than if I’d shouted. He looked down at his hands.
“I know that now.”
I searched the box again. There were copies of letters addressed to Dad, newspaper clippings, and a folded police report. Underneath them lay a cream-colored envelope with my name written across the front.
Emma.
The handwriting was Mom’s.
I knew it from the birthday cards I still kept in my desk drawer.
Dad reached toward me. “Before you read that, there’s something I need to explain.”
But I had spent twenty years hearing his explanations.
I opened the envelope.
Inside was a single sheet of paper. Mom had written a date at the top, three months before she died.
The first line read:
If Daniel ever comes looking for Emma, you must tell her the truth about the night she was born……………………..
