The shadows in her room were already the deep shades of night. Heather flicked the light on and began rummaging around in her case, trying to retrieve the bottle of wine that was nestled beneath her discarded socks and t-shirts. Her fingers had just closed around the neck when she saw a dark shape sitting neatly in the center of her pillow. She dropped the wine and straightened up, her heart skipping sickly in her chest.

Although it wasn’t the right size or shape at all, for an awful instant she was sure it was a dead bird, even as her eyes confirmed the truth—it was an old Polaroid photograph, very much like the two she had found in the abandoned caravan. The photo showed a typical scene between two lovers—a man and a woman on a beach, the sea a burnished strip of blue behind them, the man with his arm draped possessively around the woman’s narrow shoulders. They were both wearing coats and hats, their cheeks pink with the cold. The woman’s face was coyly turned inward, nuzzling a little at the man’s broad chest, and her left hand was tucked snugly between the man’s knees. She was grinning, her eyes shining. She looked very young. There was no question that these two people were a couple, and it was almost charming in its simplicity—a couple on a beach, enjoying themselves, very much in love.

Except that the man was a notorious serial killer, and the woman was her mum.

Heather snatched the photo off the pillow. Her breathing sounded too loud, whistling in and out like a kettle boiling. She shook the photo and pressed her fingers to the shiny surface in the strange and slightly desperate hope that it would prove to be a fake—something crafted in photoshop and printed on fancy paper. But she’d handled enough photos in the newspaper’s archive to know what it was. It was real. A real photograph of Michael Reave and Colleen Evans, cozied up with their arms around each other. Her mother even had on the same thick winter coat she had been wearing in Pamela’s photo.

She turned it over. On the back were two scraps of writing, each written in a different hand with a different color pen. The first one, written in black ballpoint pen, said:

Fresh air!! March 27th, 1983

The second, in red ink and a familiar, blocky font, read:

I know what you are, and I think you do too.

For long, elastic minutes, Heather couldn’t do anything at all. She stood with the Polaroid clutched between her fingers. She couldn’t stop looking at the date.

March the 27^th, in 1983. Heather’s birthday was in October of that year.

No.

If the date was correct, then her mother was already pregnant in this picture. Had been pregnant for maybe six or seven weeks.

No.

Reluctantly, she turned the photo over and looked again at her mother, this girl-child image that she had never seen before. There was no way of telling, with the big coat covering her lap, but then some women didn’t show until fairly late in their pregnancy, especially when it was their first child. And hadn’t her mum and dad gotten married when she was a toddler? Why had she never questioned that? They had always told her they had known each other since school, that they had started dating when Colleen was nineteen, but that had to have been a lie. An image of her dad floated into her mind, his round, easily flushed face, the strawberry blond hair that edged into straight-up ginger near his ears, or when he grew a beard.