I read the sentence three times.
I need to see you once.
Not for the lottery.
Not for the business.
For our daughter.
My hands began shaking.
Below the words was a location.
The old lakeside cottage Mark and I had rented during the first summer of our marriage.
He’d purchased it years later as an investment.
It had stood empty for months.
The letter ended:
There is something I should have told you in 1998.
I called Miriam immediately.
She told me not to go.
I agreed.
Then I spent the next hour imagining myself driving there anyway.
I wanted to scream at him.
I wanted him to tell me what happened.
I wanted to know whether he’d lied about her final moments.
But I also understood that he had chosen the one subject powerful enough to make me disregard every warning.
I gave the letter to Detective Sloane.
