Someone had found the place before her. Someone had beaten her to it. The house had been searched. Antiques that may have hidden anything lay in shards on the floors. Books had been ripped apart; so had the chairs and sofas. There were holes punched in the walls. If there had been anything to find, it was gone. She wanted to cry. It was almost worse, finding this corner of Justin’s life that she had never seen before and realizing that a stranger had already violated it. Her breath came raggedly. Her eyes felt full. The house smelled like him, but he was gone.

Peach crossed from the living room to the house’s single bedroom. It was dark even in the daylight. The wooden floor groaned under her feet. There was a twin bed, with a mattress that had been slashed, and a state-of-the-art desktop computer that had been disassembled to remove its hard drive, leaving a hole. The monitor was smashed, exposing its interior components. A file cabinet was pushed against the wall, its drawers open and empty. He’d had pictures on the wall, but they’d been ripped apart, exposing the rear of the frames.

Nothing. They’d left her nothing.

She saw a table near the bedroom’s only window, which looked out on the sorry lawn. Outside, she saw the mature oak tree with a canvas chair beneath it. A ladder in the dirt. A push lawnmower that had long since rusted into disuse. Inside, there was a coffee mug on the table. She could imagine Justin here, sipping tea, staring at the lonely brush, working on – what?

A photo frame lay on the floor near the table, its glass broken. The photo was still inside the frame. It was her. It was the same photo of Peach standing outside the Crab Shack restaurant.

Another message?

If so, she didn’t understand it, because this photograph didn’t contain the edits she’d seen on her phone. Maybe the picture was simply a reminder that he’d been in love with her. He’d kept it in his bedroom. He’d stared at her when he was here.

She felt like crying all over again.

Peach took a long, deep breath of hot, dusty air. There was no evidence to find here, nothing that would help her. She’d reached another dead end. However, as she took a last look around the bedroom, she spotted a tiny triangle of paper peeking out from under the file cabinet. When she pushed the empty cabinet aside, she jumped as a three-inch lizard made a frantic escape. She bent down and retrieved the paper.

Someone – Justin? – had taken a close-up picture of a newspaper article that been pinned to a cork bulletin board. It was impossible to tell where the photo had been taken. The article itself appeared to be nearly a decade old, copied from a Tampa newspaper.