THREE SISTERS

Chapter 1: The Phone Call

The phone rang at 2:47 in the morning, and Mara Voss knew before she answered it that her life had just split into a before and an after.

She’d spent twelve years training herself not to flinch at calls from area code 207 — letting them go to voicemail, deleting messages without listening past the first three words. But some animal part of her still recognized that rhythm, and still, after all this time, picked up.

“Mara Voss?”

The voice was unfamiliar. Male, official, careful in the way people get when they’ve delivered this kind of news before.

“Yes.”

“This is Deputy Sheriff Marcus Halloran, Alderbrook PD. I’m sorry to be calling so late. Are you sitting down?”

She wasn’t. She stood barefoot on the cold kitchen tile, staring at her own reflection in the dark window, and something in her chest was already collapsing before he said the next sentence.

“It’s about your sister. Elena.”

Mara closed her eyes.

“She was found this evening at her home on Birch Hollow Road. I’m very sorry — she’s passed away. Right now it looks like she took her own life.”

The words hovered somewhere outside her, like they belonged to someone else’s sister. Elena, who used to braid Mara’s hair too tight just to hear her yelp. Elena, who hadn’t called Mara in fourteen months — and whose last text, sent eleven weeks ago from an unfamiliar number, had said only: I need to talk to you. Not on the phone.

Mara had never called her back.

“Ms. Voss? Are you still there?”

“I’m here.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “You said it looks like suicide.”

A beat too long before he answered. “The scene’s consistent with that, yes.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Ma’am, I can’t speculate over the phone.”

“I’m not asking you to speculate. I’m asking why you said looks like twice instead of just telling me my sister killed herself.”

The silence told her more than anything he could have said.

“The funeral home will be in touch. Is there anyone who can be with you tonight?”

There had never really been anyone, not since she’d left Alderbrook at twenty-two — left behind everyone who knew what her name used to mean in that town, or what had happened to the youngest Voss sister in Cinder Lake nineteen years ago.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll drive up in the morning.”

She hung up before he could answer, stood a moment listening to the refrigerator hum, then pulled down the suitcase she hadn’t opened since her last visit home and began, with hands gone strangely steady, to pack.

It was still dark when she pulled onto the interstate, coffee going cold, radio off. It looks like suicide. Twice. A cop didn’t say that by accident. He said it when the scene bothered him and the paperwork didn’t match his gut.

Mara knew that instinct. She’d spent eleven years as a forensic accountant because she trusted numbers that didn’t add up more than people who insisted they did. Elena had been reckless, secretive, evasive — but never the kind of person who gave up.

Three hours later, as signs counted down the miles to Alderbrook, Mara’s phone buzzed. A text, from a number she didn’t recognize.

Don’t trust the sheriff’s report. Elena found something. She was trying to tell you before she died. Meet me at the old boathouse tonight, alone. Come alone or don’t come at all.

Mara’s hands tightened on the wheel, her heart slamming the way it hadn’t since she was fifteen, standing on the dock in the dark, screaming a name into water that never answered back.

She typed with one thumb: Who is this?

The reply came instantly, as if whoever it was had been waiting.

Someone who knows what really happened to Ivy.

The phone slipped from her fingers. Ahead, the exit sign for Alderbrook rose out of the fog like something surfacing from deep water, and for the first time in twelve years, Mara felt the sick certainty she was driving straight back into the story she’d spent her life running from.

Chapter 2: Alderbrook Again

The town of Alderbrook looked exactly the same, and that was the strangest part.

Mara had expected time to have changed it — new stores, new roads, new faces. But as she drove past the old stone church and the diner with the flickering sign, she felt like she had never left. The same maple trees lined Main Street. The same clock tower still showed the wrong time. Twelve years, and Alderbrook had simply waited for her, frozen, the way a bad memory waits in the back of your mind.

She slowed as she passed the sheriff’s office. A single police cruiser sat outside. Somewhere behind those doors was a file with her sister’s name on it, and words like scene and cause of death written in careful, clinical language. Mara thought about stopping. She kept driving.

Cinder Lake appeared on her right, gray and still under the morning sky. Mara’s hands tightened on the wheel without her meaning to. She had not seen this lake in twelve years, and yet her body remembered it perfectly — the cold of it, the way sound traveled strangely across the water at night, the exact spot on the shoreline where everything had gone wrong when she was fifteen.

She forced her eyes back to the road.

The Voss family home stood at the top of Birch Hollow Road, a large white house with black shutters, half-hidden behind old oak trees. It had always looked too grand for a small town, too quiet for a family that had lost so much. Mara parked and sat for a moment, engine off, staring at the front door.

She had grown up in this house. She had also spent every year since leaving it trying to forget that she had.

The door opened before she reached it. Rosa Ibarra stood there — older now, her dark hair streaked with gray, but her face was the same face that had fed Mara breakfast every morning of her childhood. Rosa’s eyes were red from crying.

“Mara.” Rosa’s voice broke on the word. She pulled Mara into a tight hug. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“I know,” Mara said, though she didn’t, not really.

Rosa stepped back, studying her. “You look like your mother,” she said quietly. “More every year.”

Mara didn’t know what to say to that. Her mother had died when Mara was nineteen, and no one in this town had ever said her mother’s name without a strange, careful tone — the tone people used when they were hiding something.

“Is my father here?” Mara asked.

Something flickered across Rosa’s face. “He’s in his study. He hasn’t come out much since they found her.” Rosa hesitated. “Mara, there’s something you should know before you see him.”

“What?”

Rosa glanced toward the closed study door, then lowered her voice. “Elena came here three days before she died. She and your father argued. I’ve never heard them argue like that. She kept saying a name, over and over.”

Mara’s stomach turned cold. “What name?”

Rosa’s eyes filled with tears again. “Ivy’s.”

The word landed in the hallway like something breaking.

“Your father told her to stop,” Rosa continued, her voice barely a whisper. “He said some things were better left buried. And Elena said — ” Rosa stopped, pressing a hand to her mouth.

“Said what, Rosa?”

“She said, Not when the truth is still walking around town."

Mara felt the floor tilt slightly beneath her. She thought of the text message from that morning — someone who knows what really happened to Ivy — and of the photograph Elena had supposedly kept hidden, the one of a young woman who looked exactly like the sister they had buried an empty casket for, nineteen years ago.

“Rosa.” Mara’s voice came out low and urgent. “Did Elena ever mention someone named Claire?”

Rosa’s face went pale, in a way that told Mara everything before the older woman even opened her mouth.

“How do you know that name?” Rosa whispered. “Nobody was supposed to know that name.”

Behind them, the study door creaked open. Richard Voss stood there, thinner and grayer than Mara remembered, his eyes moving slowly from Rosa’s frightened face to his daughter’s.

“Mara,” he said quietly. “We need to talk. Now. Before anyone else finds out you’re here.”