nodded, wiping my tears.
But before we could leave, Margaret suddenly grabbed my wrist.
“Wait,” she whispered.
She pointed to the envelope.
“There was something else inside.”
I turned it upside down.
A tiny folded photograph slipped onto the floor.
It showed my mother standing beside Adrian, holding a newborn baby.
But behind them stood another man.
A man I recognized immediately from Jonah’s family photographs.
Jonah’s father.
On the back, my mother had written:
THE WRONG BROTHER WAS ACCUSED. THE WRONG SON WAS PUNISHED. AND THE WRONG WOMAN PAID
THE PRICE.
Jonah stared at the photograph.
Then his phone lit up with a new message from an unknown number.
If you want to know who really killed Maria, come to the cemetery tonight. Come alone.
Below the message was a photograph of a gravestone.
The name carved into it made my blood run cold.
ADRIAN VALE.
My father had supposedly disappeared twenty-eight years ago.
But someone had just invited us to visit his grave.
And I knew, with a certainty that terrified me, that the final truth was waiting
