Caroline's hands were shaking so badly she dropped the key twice before it found the lock.

The door swung inward.

The room on the other side was small.

A camping lantern on the floor.

Two sleeping bags.

A plastic crate stacked with food wrappers and a child's drawing book.

The kind of space that had been lived in carefully, quietly, by someone who knew they had to leave no trace.

A woman was standing against the far wall.

She was thin.

Her hair was longer than I remembered.

Her eyes were the same.

"Diane."

My sister had been missing for six years.

She didn't move toward me.

Neither did I.

We stood there in the narrow light while Mia pressed herself against Diane's leg and Lily hovered in the passage behind me, watching everything.

"You're supposed to be de—" I stopped.

"They told me you were gone."

"I know what they told you." Her voice was steady but her hands weren't.

"I'm sorry, Ryan.

I didn't have a choice about where I went.

I had a choice about where I came back to."

I turned to Caroline.

"You knew." It wasn't a question.

"How long?"

Caroline's jaw tightened.

"Eight months."

"Eight months."

"She came to me because she had nowhere else to go.

She was frightened.

Mia was sick.

I couldn't turn them away."

"You could have told me."

"I wanted to." Her voice broke on the last word.

"I was going to.

I just — I needed to know it was safe first."

"Safe from what?" I looked back at Diane.

"What are you running from?"

Diane reached into the sleeping bag and pulled out a brown envelope.

She held it out but didn't step forward.

I had to cross the room to take it.

Inside were photographs.

Printed, not digital.

The kind someone prints when they don't trust a phone.

The first image showed a man I recognized immediately.

Thomas Hale.

He had been my father's business partner for twenty years.

He had delivered the eulogy at my father's funeral.

He had sat across from me at the reading of the will and shaken my hand and told me my father would have been proud.

In the photograph, he was standing outside a building I didn't recognize.

With Diane.

And she was not standing willingly.

"He didn't want me to disappear," Diane said.

"He wanted me gone.

There's a difference."

My fingers tightened on the envelope.

"What did he do?"

"He found out I knew about the accounts.

Dad's accounts.

The ones Thomas moved before Dad got sick." She paused.

"The ones that should have come to you."

The lantern flickered.

Mia had fallen asleep against Diane's leg, one small fist curled around the fabric of her mother's sleeve.

"How much?" I asked.

"Enough that he couldn't let me stay in the country and talk about it."

I looked at the photograph again.

Then at my sister's face.

Then at the child on the floor who had crawled out of a wall and called me Daddy because her mother had shown her my face in a photograph and told her: if you ever find him, you'll be safe.

"Why didn't you come to me directly?"

Diane looked at Caroline.

Something passed between them that I didn't have the language for yet.

"Because Thomas has been watching you," Caroline said quietly.

"That's why I didn't tell you.

The moment you knew, you'd go straight at him.

And he'd know she was here."

I set the envelope down on the crate.

"Does he know now?"

Neither of them answered.

But Lily, still standing in the passage behind me, said in a very small voice:

"There was a car outside again tonight.

The same one as yesterday."