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The stairs turned twice and ended one floor up, where I fumbled for the latch and a second door swung open to reveal the upstairs hallway. To my right was the window that looked out on the bay.
To my left, down the hall, standing exactly where I’d been on the night when I saw the man-shaped shadow that I’d convinced myself was only a dream, was Adam. He stared at me, his eyes wide. Startled, I thought—but not surprised.
After all, we had both been here before.
“Hi,” I said.
“Wow, hi.” He flashed me a weird lopsided smile, as if half his face couldn’t quite pull it together to make the right shape. “Where’d you come from?”
“There’s a staircase.”
“Oh,” he said. “How about a secret toilet?”
He laughed. I didn’t.
“It goes to that back room downstairs where Mimi stayed. It’s probably how my grandfather used to get into Shelly’s room at night without anyone seeing,” I said. “That room, my room, it used to be the nursery. So he would walk down this hall, past the room where his baby daughter was asleep in her crib, and go downstairs to fuck the maid.”
“Yeah. Wow,” he said, again.
I stared at him. “Adam, where did you get my ring?”
The smile stayed plastered on his face. “What?”
“My ring. You said you got it secondhand. Where?”
“Oh.” He hesitated. “Some antique store.”
“Antique store. Which one?”
“I don’t know.” He shifted his weight. “I don’t remember. Why?”
“Because it was my great-grandmother’s.”
There was a long silence. “I thought her name was Evelyn,” he said finally.
“It was. Evelyn Alice Teasdale. E.A.T. The E had gotten worn down. My great-grandfather gave it to her when they were dating. Olly, it’s a pet name. Short for Roland. But you wouldn’t have known that.”
He didn’t answer. I didn’t need him to.
“My grandmother, when she started getting sick, she hid a bunch of valuables. Mostly old jewelry. We were never able to figure out where, and obviously she didn’t remember. I had a list of everything that was lost so that I could submit it to the insurance. All those heirlooms, we had records of them, you know?”
“No,” he said finally, and a note of bitterness crept into his voice. “I wouldn’t know about heirlooms. That’s not really my area, is it?” His shoulders slumped. “All right, I guess there’s no point in lying. It was in the attic. When you guys sent me up there to look for the photos, I found a bunch of stuff stashed in one of those trunks, and I thought... well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I shouldn’t have taken it. I know that. I just, I couldn’t afford a ring. And I kinda convinced myself that it wasn’t really stealing if I gave it to you.”
“I understand.” I paused. “It’s just funny, because another one of those missing pieces, we found before she died. You know that day when she disappeared? She came back with a necklace. My mom and I figured she’d stumbled on her hiding place while she was wandering around the house and pocketed it. But when I asked, she said her sweetheart gave it to her.”
“You know that’s normal,” he said. “People with dementia—”
“Oh, I know.” I cut him off. “They make up a story. But I don’t think she made this one up, Adam. I think she was telling the truth. The problem was that I wouldn’t believe it.”
I beckoned him to come stand beside me, rummaging among the objects in my bag until I found the phone. “I want you to look at some photos. Starting with this one. And then just scroll back through.”
“Why?” he said, but I just held the phone out, and finally he shrugged, taking it and swiping his thumb over the first picture: the funeral.
“I can hardly see this,” he said. His voice was guarded. “Is that... us?”
“Yes. Keep scrolling.”
He did, reluctantly. Through the next funeral photo and the next. Past the shot outside the house. The next picture: me outside the bakery. Staring at the camera with a bag in my hand. He lifted his thumb away. “Okay, cool,” he said a little too loudly, then tried to hand the phone back to me.
