It was true, it had been several years since Eileen had purchased one of Clare’s books; she supposed something may have changed for her sister in that time. Maybe she had grown to love Simon.

“More wine, Ms. Greyden?”

“Yes, please.”

Chapter 7

Clare

Two years before her death

Like some weird, obsessive stalker, Clare kept refreshing her Sara Smith Facebook page every ten to twenty minutes, checking to see if Kaylee had accepted her. After an hour with no response, Clare got up from her chair and paced her study, from her desk at one end to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the other. She twisted Adam’s engagement ring round and round her finger. On her third lap, her eyes fell on the bottom three shelves of her bookcase. Her journals, every one of them she had ever filled since she was eleven years old. The one constant thing that had followed her from her childhood in Casper to New York and then back across to the other side of the country. Her documentation of life as she had lived it—she’d kept every one.

Her eyes found the first one, crammed tight between the whitewashed wood of the shelf and the hundred other journals she had filled with ink over the years. She knelt in front of the shelf, her finger working to dislodge the thin spine from the tight space until the slim volume came loose in her hand. With her legs crossed beneath her, Clare held the now limp and faded book closed in her lap. A kaleidoscopic swirl of rainbow colors overlaid with a translucent, shiny foil that had lifted and peeled away from the edges of the cover over the past three decades—My Diary was centered in a large silver script.

It had been a birthday gift from Adam. Clare held the book between her palms and closed her eyes.

“Tell me a story, Clare.”

Her eyes flew open, the sound of Adam’s voice still clear in her mind, but also, it was as if she had heard it in the room. His sound, his exact pitch and tone, the lifetime she’d lived with that voice—the eternity it had been since she’d heard it.

“Adam?” she whispered into the room. Only the sound of her own heart rushing in her ears answered her. Twenty years. In a few months, it would be twenty years since that night. The thumb of her left hand pressed against his ring on her finger.

She opened the journal and stared down into her eleven-year-old handwriting. Looking at the loopy and irregular, slightly wild cursive that had improved only a little in the last twenty-seven years, Clare read the first line she’d ever put down into the world.

Mama said Daddy isn’t coming home.