Chapter 1
The envelope didn’t have a return address.
It was a pale cream; the kind you only see in old stationery sets or wedding invitations. The edges were slightly frayed, like it had traveled too far for too long. Her name was written in delicate, looping cursive across the front—Evelyn Harper, followed by her address. Not “Evie Harper,” which is the name most people knew her by. No “Ms. Evelyn Harper” like it would have been coming from a business. And something about the writing seemed familiar.
She held it in her hands, staring at the handwriting a full minute before opening it. The postmark was smudged so you couldn’t read what city or state it had come from.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded once. Her hands began to tremble the moment she saw the handwriting. She would have known it anywhere: slightly slanted, clean but hesitant, as if each letter had been considered carefully before being born. It was her handwriting.
Her sister, Lydia’s handwriting. Her sister who had been dead for fifteen years.
Evelyn, I know this is a shock. I don’t expect you to believe it, not at first. But I promise you, this is real. I didn’t die. Neither did Marcus. We had to disappear. We had to make them believe it. We had to keep you safe, too. I’ve waited fifteen years to say this. It’s finally over. The danger is gone. We can come home now. I want to see you. I’ll explain everything. -Lydia
Evelyn read it again, and then a third time while her pulse pounded behind her eyes. She felt like something in the room had shifted. She looked for a clue that this was a trick, prank, or a cruel joke.
But the name at the bottom made the world tilt.
Lydia.
Her sister and brother-in-law, Marcus had died in a plane crash fifteen years ago, almost to the day. She remembered every detail of that day: the call from the authorities, the half-burned wreckage.
The bodies had been taken away by the time she got there. Burnt beyond recognition, she’d been told. They’d have to be identified with DNA.
She remembered the newspaper headline: LOCAL COUPLE LOST IN TRAGIC CRASH. She remembered picking the song for the funeral. The closed caskets with pictures of Lydia and Marcus on the top.
And now she was supposed to believe that her sister and brother-in-law’s bodies were not in those caskets?
Her first instinct was to rip the letter in half. Burn it. Pretend it never arrived. But something in her—a deep longing or a frantic hope—kept her still. She sank slowly onto the edge of the couch, the paper trembling in her lap.
She hadn’t spoken Lydia’s name out loud in years.
A sick heat rose in her chest. If this was real, then it meant…they lied. Everyone lied. The funeral, the grief, the years of therapy, the nightmares. It meant she’d mourned a ghost while her sister walked free somewhere, hidden from the world.
Or—it wasn’t real at all.
Maybe someone had found one of Lydia’s old notebooks and copied her writing. Maybe it was some kind of scam. People preyed on grief. There was a whole genre of it. She’d seen the documentaries about desperate families paying ridiculous amounts of money for proof that their loved ones were still alive.
Evelyn stood up too fast and the room spun.
She turned the envelope over again. There was no return address. She looked inside the envelope to see if there was some other form of evidence to prove this was just a prank and something else slipped free—a torn page from a photo album. A picture she hadn’t seen in over two decades. It was of the two of them, arms around each other at Lake Pines the summer before Lydia left for college. Lydia was barefoot in the grass, laughing, holding a cherry Popsicle. Evelyn remembered that day. Their cousin Harold took the picture. She remembered what he said before the shutter clicked, “Say popsicle!”
She turned the photo over.
In that same looping cursive, there were five words.
Meet me at our favorite place.
