Chapter 2 - A Gathering of Strangers
I threw the Civic into reverse, tires spitting gravel, and swerved around the corner before Suzanne could reach the driver's side door. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. In the rearview mirror, I saw her stop, lower her hand, and turn back to my mother, who was pointing toward the church lawn with a tight, strained smile.
They weren't just hiding me from Avery. They were hiding something from everyone.
By Tuesday afternoon, the tension in my chest had hardened into cold resolve. I didn't go to work at the garden center. Instead, I drove to the county records office in downtown Birmingham, a sprawling limestone building where the air smelled of old paper and floor wax.
Birth certificates, property deeds, hospital logs. I spent four hours digging through microfiche and county ledgers, looking for anything connecting the Lockheart family to mine before the year I turned eighteen. The clerk at the front desk, a bored woman with oversized glasses, barely glanced at my paperwork.
“Eighty-four through ninety-six?” she muttered. “Most of those old baptismal and birth records from the private clinics down in Chilton were digitized last year. Try terminal four.”
I sat at the flickering green-screen monitor, scrolling through digitized church rolls and local society pages from the Chilton County Chronicle.
And then I found it.
August 14, 2004.
A tragic accident claims the life of seven-year-old Claire Lockheart, beloved daughter of Robert and Suzanne Lockheart, following a weekend boating excursion on Lake Martin.
I stared at the screen, the breath leaving my lungs all at once.
Claire Lockheart. The little girl with the gap-toothed smile and the gold locket in the silver frame on my parents' dining table.
I did the math in my head, my hands trembling slightly on the plastic keyboard. I had been ten years old in the summer of 2004. That was the summer my parents sent me away to stay with an aunt in Mississippi for three months—an aunt I had never met before or since, who spent the entire summer making me wear long-sleeved shirts and keeping me inside the house.
When I came home that September, my mother had redecorated my bedroom. Different wallpaper. Different bedspread.
And a brand-new set of rules.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, shattering the quiet hum of the archives room. It was a text from an unknown number, though I knew the cadence immediately.
Supper at the house tonight. 6 PM sharp. Don't be late.
May you like
It wasn't signed, but it came from my mother's number. And for the first time in eight years, the text didn't say Be gone. It commanded me to come home.
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