By noon, the four of us sat around the kitchen table with the photograph placed in the center. Patrick refused to let anyone doubt.
“What if someone took her that day?” he demanded. “What if she couldn’t get back? What if she only found out later?”
My mother cried softly and kept touching the edge of the photograph. My father stared at it for a long time before finally saying:
“It looks like her.”
By evening, we had built entire stories around one picture and one note. We were not foolish. We were grieving. There is a difference, but when hope is involved, the distance between the two becomes dangerously small.
I barely slept that night.
Patrick did not sleep at all.
Around two in the morning, I found him sitting at the kitchen table with the photograph.
“I keep trying to remember if her left eyebrow always sat a little higher when she was thinking,” he said.
“Patrick…”
“What if she’s been waiting for us?”
The next morning, cold daylight forced us to look again.
My mother was the first to say it.
“Where is Lily’s birthmark?”
Everything inside me went still.
I took the photo from Patrick and looked closer.
Lily had a small crescent-shaped birthmark near her collarbone.
The girl in the photo did not.
Patrick saw my face change.
“What?”
I did not answer fast enough.
“What?” he repeated.
I turned the photo toward him and pointed.
For a second, he only stared.
Then he shook his head.
“No. Maybe it’s the angle.”
“It isn’t.”
“Maybe makeup covered it.”
“Patrick.”
“Maybe the picture was edited.”
His voice kept rising. I think he felt the truth coming and hated me for seeing it first.
Then he looked from one face to another, and realization finally reached him.
He folded in on himself and covered his mouth with both hands.
