Page 5

My fingers hover over the next drawer before I close the one I'm examining.

Okay.

Even I have limits.

Apparently, those limits begin somewhere between breaking into a man's house and investigating his underwear.

Progress.

I turn toward a small desk against the opposite wall.

Now that's more promising.

A leather folder sits beside a closed laptop.

I open the folder.

Bills.

Insurance documents.

A couple of receipts.

And beneath them, a folded newspaper clipping.

My heart gives a painful little kick.

I know that photograph.

I've studied it so often I could probably draw the building from memory.

Blackened windows.

Collapsed roof.

Firefighters standing behind yellow tape.

I carefully unfold the article.

The headline confirms what I've already read a hundred times.

A man died in that fire four years ago.

The same man whose obituary I found among Mom's belongings.

My thoughts return to his face in the photograph.

He had my eyes.

The exact same unusual olive-green shade that Mom always insisted I'd inherited from some distant relative.

Except nobody in her family has eyes like mine.

He also had my cheekbones.

My mouth.

And a face that made something inside me ache with recognition.