Chapter 6: Three Photos

My mother took the kids for ice cream, and I let Rafe drive me to his house.

It was a tall brick house on a quiet street in Lincoln Park, with a red door and a retriever behind it who threw himself at my knees.

"Down," Rafe said.

The dog did not go down. He leaned his whole weight against my legs and looked up at me with one brown eye.

"He likes you," Rafe said. "He doesn't like anyone."

"He just met me."

"He's an excellent judge."

I followed him up a staircase and into a study with a long window, a walnut desk and a safe built into the wall behind a painting of a boat.

He opened the safe and took out a manila envelope.

His hands were not quite steady.

"I haven't looked at these in six years," he said. "I couldn't throw them away."

He put the envelope on the desk and stepped back.

I noticed that he stepped back all the way to the window and put his hands in his pockets.

He was keeping to my rule, even in his own study.

I opened the flap and slid out three photographs.

The first showed me on a sidewalk outside a building I knew. I was laughing, with my head tipped back, and a man's arm was around my shoulders.

The man's head and chest had been cut off the print.

The second one was me with both hands on that same man's lapel and my forehead against his shoulder, my eyes shut.

In the third I had my hand on my stomach and his hand was laid over mine.

None of them showed his face.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Hid Your Triplets, Why Did They Crash Your Engagement from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.