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Biddy taps the little girl sitting on the woman’s hip. “Who’s she?”

“I don’t know.”

Biddy’s forehead wrinkles as she studies the picture again. “Did Mommy know her?”

“I think she did.”

Mom reaches for the photograph before I can study it again. She turns it toward the kitchen window, her eyes moving over the brickwork instead of the faces, then stops with a small frown. “I know this place.”

I look up. “You do?”

“I’m almost certain.” She traces the edge of one of the windows with her fingertip before tapping the front entrance. “This is Haven House in Albany.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Years ago.” She hands the photograph back without taking her eyes off it. “Celeste talked me into attending one of their fundraising lunches. I remember complaining about the drive, and she spent the whole trip telling me why the shelter mattered. She even pointed out those front steps because mothers kept struggling to get strollers through the entrance.”

I look at the photograph again, this time tracing the brick arches above the entrance, the lantern beside the front door, and the chipped corner of the bottom step until the building starts to matter as much as the people standing in front of it.

Mom folds her arms. “Whoever sent this wanted you to recognize more than your wife.”

“You think it came from Haven House?”

“I think somebody connected to that shelter knows exactly who your girls are, and I think that’s where you start looking.”

Babs lifts the photograph off the counter with both hands and studies it before looking up at Mom. “Can we go there?”

Mom smiles at her. “Maybe one day.”

Babs looks back at the picture, her finger resting beside Celeste. “Mommy stood there.”

“She did,” Mom says.

Biddy scoots closer until she’s nearly shoulder to shoulder with her sister, then looks up at me with wide eyes. “Can we stand there too?”

My gaze drops to the photograph before I meet hers again. “I’d like that.”

My eyes move from my daughters to the photograph, then to the cream-colored card I’d almost forgotten inside the envelope.

I unfold the card. One sentence stretches across the paper.

Every picture tells part of a story.

Beneath it, written in the same careful hand, sits the line I’ve already seen once before.

Someone your mommy helped.

I turn the card over, hoping for a name, an address, anything that tells me where to look next.

The back is blank.

It seems like whoever’s sending these wants me to keep searching.

I pull an old storage box onto my desk and set my black coffee beside it, knowing before I open the lid that sleep isn’t happening anytime soon. Whenever my head refuses to switch off, I go looking for answers, and tonight that search takes me back to the years I spent trying to leave behind.

I spread the contents across the desk until every file sits open in front of me. Photographs spill across one corner beside faded receipts, maps marked with red ink, and legal pads filled with names, addresses, and phone numbers I’d written years ago.

Every shelter, community center, church, and safe house I visited after I walked away from Spencer fills those pages, preserving the route I followed while everyone else believed I’d disappeared.