I opened it with trembling fingers.
Inside was a letter and the photograph I’d noticed the night Daniel discovered the compartment.
This time, I looked closely.
Thomas stood on the porch beside a little girl in a yellow dress.
She had tangled brown hair, scraped knees, and a blue stuffed rabbit clutched against her chest.
My breath caught.
The rabbit had one crooked ear.
Just like June’s.
I turned the photograph over.
On the back, Thomas had written a date from thirty years earlier.
And beneath it:
Sarah, age four. Her first summer with us.
I stared.
Then I remembered.
Not everything.
Just fragments.
A warm kitchen.
Someone lifting me onto a wooden stool.
Rain against a window.
A kind man showing me how to fold paper birds.
I looked at Daniel.
“That’s me.”
He studied the photograph.
Then his eyes widened.
“Dad used to tell me about a little girl who stayed here when her mother was having a difficult time.”
My hands shook as I unfolded the letter.
Thomas explained that when I was four, my father died unexpectedly. My mother, Miriam, struggled to keep us financially secure while working two jobs.
Thomas and Miriam had known each other for years.
When his small construction business nearly failed, she had once lent him the savings she’d worked so hard to accumulate.
The money helped prevent the bank from taking the Whitaker house.
