Chapter 6 - The Last Pictures
The first image looked like Maddie walking away from the beach, hood up, in the gray sweatshirt she practically lived in.
"Zoom in," Brooke whispered.
I spread my fingers across the screen.
It wasn't Maddie in the hoodie.
It was Brooke. And around her neck was Maddie's silver necklace — the one with the tiny star.
My stomach rolled. "The search team found that necklace in Maddie's tent. They told me it proved she was there that morning."
"I put it there," Brooke said. "After."
"So people would think they'd seen her leave on her own two feet."
"Only from a distance. Only for a little while. I thought it would be one day."
"Why?"
"She needed time."
"Time for what?"
"To get away before anyone came looking."
I stepped back off the porch. "You stood next to me at that lake, Brooke. You watched me scream her name into the water."
"I thought she'd come back the next morning. I really did."
"So did I," I said. "For three hundred and sixty-five mornings."
Brooke put both hands over her face. "She found the folder. The one in your dresser. She got it open the night of the campfire."
I swiped to the next photo.
Maddie, sitting inside the tent. Face blotchy, eyes red, mouth open like she was mid-sob. In one hand, the adoption papers. In the other, the little silver bracelet.
"When did she take this?"
"That night. She kept saying it over and over — 'My whole life was locked in a drawer, and she kept the key from me.'"
"Where did she go, Brooke?"
"She looked up Marcus and Deborah Ford on her phone. She found an address two states over."
"Her birth parents."
Brooke nodded.
"And you helped her get there."
"I thought I was helping her calm down. I thought if she just got her answers, she'd be ready to come home."
"But she didn't come home."
"No."
"And these people — they just kept her? A strange fifteen-year-old shows up at their door and they don't call a single adult?"
Brooke swallowed. "She told them you were dead."
The word hit me like cold water. "She told them what?"
"That you died in a car accident. She was so angry at first. Then she was ashamed of the lie. Then it got too big to take back."
My daughter had buried me in a story and gone on living inside it.
Brooke unlocked her own phone and turned the screen toward me. A text thread.
"She messaged me tonight. That's the only reason I'm standing here."
Maddie: I can't do this anymore. I lied to everybody. I want to come home and I don't know how to face Mom. Please just tell her. Please make her come get me.
Under the message was a dropped pin.
I read it twice before I looked up.
"You've been talking to her this entire time?"
Brooke's chin trembled. "Not every day. Sometimes she'd go quiet for weeks. But — yeah."
"And you let me keep searching."
She pressed her hand over her mouth and nodded.
"You're going home right now," I said. "You're going to sit your parents down and tell them every word of this."
"Okay."
"And tomorrow you're going to tell every single person who searched for her the truth."
"I will. I promise."
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"And right now," I said, already reaching for my keys, "I'm going to go get my daughter."
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