Seven Days

The letters were waiting on my kitchen counter when I got home from my mother's funeral.

Seven of them.

Fanned out like a deck of cards on the chipped Formica where she used to roll out biscuit dough every Sunday morning. Old paper, thick and expensive, yellowed at the edges. Each one damp, as if it had been carried through the storm that was currently hammering Ashford Lake. Each one sealed with dark red wax that had been pressed with a heavy signet ring. And each one marked with the same initial, written in sharp black ink.

A.

I stood in the doorway with rain dripping from my hair onto the hardwood floor she used to polish on her hands and knees, my black funeral dress clinging to my legs, my mother's house key cutting into my palm. The house smelled like her. Like lemon cleaner and coffee and the faint, medicinal smell that had followed her for the last year of chemo.

"They were in her desk," Mrs. Finch said from behind me. Helen Finch, my mother's lawyer for twenty years, clutching her own umbrella like a weapon. "The locked bottom drawer. She left strict instructions in her will. You were to receive them only upon her passing. Not a day before."

"Only upon her passing?" I turned, and my voice sounded raw, scraped from crying and not crying at the cemetery. "Helen, she's been sick for a year. She had three hundred and sixty-five days to give me whatever this is. She had time to tell me she was cutting me out, she had time to tell me she sold my father's boat, but she didn't have time for this?"

"She said you'd be angry." Helen finally looked at me, and her eyes were red. "She said to tell you Day One starts now. And she said to tell you not to trust anyone who comes looking for them."

Day One. The phrase made ice slide down my spine despite the humid heat coming off the lake.

I picked up the top envelope. The wax was still soft. Not brittle with age. Soft and warm, as if it had been sealed an hour ago, not ten years ago. The paper underneath was cold and wet. My thumbprint showed up dark on it.

"Who delivered these? Who was here?"

"No one delivered them. They were there when I opened the desk this morning, Emily. I swear to you. The house was locked."

The house had been locked when I left for the funeral. I had locked it myself.

My phone buzzed in my clutch.

Unknown number.

ONE LETTER A DAY. SEVEN DAYS TO FIND THE TRUTH. IF YOU BURN THEM, HE DIES. - A

My hands went numb. The envelope slipped from my fingers and hit the floor, scattering the other six across the wet wood. My heart was suddenly beating so loud I was sure Helen could hear it.

"If you burn them, he dies." I whispered it out loud. "Who is he?"

Helen bent to pick them up, but I grabbed her wrist. "Don't."

Another buzz. A photo this time. It was grainy, taken in this rain. It was my dock. Taken from the lake, looking back at the house. The light was on in my mother's bedroom. My bedroom window. Tonight.

Caption: YOU'RE LATE.

It was 8:47 PM.

I tore open the first letter. I didn't care about preserving the wax anymore. Inside was a single sheet of heavy paper, hand-written in the same sharp, angry hand as the initial on the envelope.

Day One: You didn't ask why your mother really left your father. You didn't ask why she made YOU leave. You didn't ask why the Brooks family paid for your college. Come to the dock at 9 PM. Come alone. Don't trust Daniel. He was there that night. - A

The floor tilted.

My mother didn't leave my father. My father left us. That's what I'd been told since I was eight years old. He got on his boat and didn't come back and the lake took him. That's why my mother made me leave Ashford Lake at eighteen, why she sent me to Seattle to live with my aunt, why she told me never to come back except to visit. Because the lake takes Brooks men and Carter girls or some superstitious nonsense.

And the Brooks family paid for my college because Daniel's mother felt sorry for us. That's what my mother said.

Daniel.

Daniel Brooks.

I hadn't said his name out loud in ten years. The boy who taught me to swim by holding me under the water until I learned to kick. The boy who kissed me for the first time in that boathouse across the lake when I was sixteen and he was eighteen, and promised he'd wait. The boy who didn't wait, who went to Stanford and became a CEO and married some venture capitalist's daughter in TechCrunch.

The last I'd heard, he was worth two billion dollars and hadn't set foot in Ashford since his own father died five years ago.

I looked up through the wall of windows that faced the lake. The rain was coming down in sheets now, hammering the tin roof of the porch. Across the water, maybe three hundred yards away, I could see the old Brooks boathouse. The one where Daniel and I had our first kiss. The one that had been boarded up and empty since his father died.

A light had just come on inside it. A warm, yellow light that flickered.

Someone was in there. Tonight. Right now.

"Helen, you need to leave," I said, my voice suddenly calm. The investigative journalist voice I used when I was interviewing a source who was lying to me. "Now."

"Emily, what is this? Who is A?"

"I don't know. But I think my mother did. And I think she was trying to protect me from it."

Helen left, her heels clicking fast on the wet porch. I waited until I heard her car start, then I grabbed my mother's old beige trench coat from the hook by the door. The one she wore over her nurse's uniform for thirty years. It still smelled like her. I didn't have shoes. I kicked off my funeral heels and went barefoot.

I clutched the seven letters to my chest. They were already soaking through, the ink beginning to bleed at the edges. The wax seal on the top one was bleeding red down the paper like blood.

The wind tore at my hair the second I stepped onto the dock. The old boards were slick and cold and slimy with lake algae. The lake smelled like mud and gasoline and coming lightning. The rain was so heavy I could barely see the end of my own dock.

Someone was standing at the end of it.

Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark suit that must have cost more than my mother's house, now drenched black. Not moving. Just watching me run toward him through the storm like he'd been waiting there for years.

Daniel.

He looked exactly the same and nothing like the boy I remembered. Same dark hair, now cut short and severe. Same scar on his left eyebrow from when I hit him with an oar when we were twelve. But his jaw was sharper. His face was harder. The kind of face that had seen boardrooms and betrayals and hostile takeovers. The kind of eyes that didn't believe in happy endings anymore.

He held a clear umbrella. Big, transparent, dotted with raindrops. He wasn't using it for himself. His own shoulders were soaked. He held it out, angled, over the empty space where I would be. Waiting for me to step into it.

"You're holding them wrong," he said, his voice low, barely audible over the rain hammering the lake. Deeper than I remembered. Rougher. "If they get too wet, the ink runs. And you need to read all seven."

I stopped a foot away from him, gasping, my trench coat plastered to my body, my hair stuck to my face. Water ran down my cheeks. I couldn't tell if I was crying and I didn't care.

"You knew," I whispered, fanning out the seven sodden letters, furious, shaking. "You knew about these. You knew about my mother. 'Don't trust Daniel. He was there that night.' What night, Daniel?"

His eyes flicked down to the letters in my hands, to the wax seal with the A, and something like pain crossed his face, so fast I almost missed it.

"I told your mother not to keep them. I told her to burn them ten years ago."

"Don't you dare talk about my mother -" My voice cracked. "My mother just died. And you - you're here with an umbrella like some knight in shining -"

The boathouse exploded.

Not a small pop. Not a gas leak. A full, violent, orange fireball that ripped through the rain and lit up the entire lake, reflected in Daniel's eyes and in the wet letters in my hands.

The blast wave hit us a second later. Hot, concussive air, even through the cold rain. The sound was deafening.

I screamed and dropped the letters. They scattered across the dock.

Daniel didn't flinch. He didn't look at the fire that was now eating the boathouse alive across the water, flames reflecting in the black lake.

He moved. One step. He dropped to his knees on the wet wood, gathering the seven letters with one hand while holding that clear umbrella over both of us with the other, shielding them, shielding me, from the rain that was now mixed with ash.

His free hand clamped down over mine, hard, wet, shaking slightly. Not from cold.

"Day One," he said quietly, his forehead almost touching mine under the umbrella, his voice the only thing I could hear over the roaring fire. Rain drummed on the clear plastic above us. "Welcome home, Emily Carter."

In my hands, under his, the first envelope, now soaked through completely, finally gave up its wax seal and fell open on its own.

Inside, there was no letter anymore. Just a single Polaroid photograph, bleeding with water.

It was my mother. Young. In her nurse's uniform. Smiling. And she was holding a baby.

On the back, in my mother's handwriting, it said: Daniel Brooks, 2 days old. Don't let him find out.

I looked up at Daniel. He was staring at the photo over my shoulder.

And his face had gone completely white.