“Oh my God, stop it,” Lily said. “You don’t have to keep apologizing. None of this was your fault.”
Zoey turned to her, tears in her eyes. “I involved you in something dangerous. And you had no support out there, not like we have at the shelter. It was reckless and stupid.”
“If you’re responsible for putting me in danger, then I’m responsible for putting Everett in danger. Is that what you think? I mean, it’s what I think, but is that what you’re saying to me?” She gave her friend a shake and laughed at the way she groaned.
“You know that’s not what I mean!”
“Then stop blaming yourself.”
“Only if you stop blaming yourself,” Zoey countered.
“Jesus, we’re a mess.” When Zoey pulled her in for another hug, Lily held on tight for a long time before letting go.
She kissed Zoey’s cheek. “Tell the kids to head outside. I’ll be right there.”
“You got it.”
When Zoey left, Lily moved the other letter to the front. She’d barely looked at it since she’d first seen it, and goose bumps prickled her arms now.
She turned it to its side, opened the flap, and let the contents slide out to her palm.
I told the police I thought he’d stored things somewhere cuz when we first moved to Herriman, he took a bunch of bins from the garage and never brought them back. They didn’t believe me. Said nothing showed up in the banking. Said it was probably trash, like I’m stupid enough to think he’d move trash with us from Omaha to Kansas.
Lily, I don’t even think those cops are trying. They want this all to go away cuz it looks bad for them. And they’re his buddies. I don’t trust them at all. So when I was packing up the last of my things from that goddamn house and saw this at the bottom of a drawer . . . I decided to give it to you. You do whatever you want with it.
I’m sorry again.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” she whispered to Amber as she closed her fingers around the jagged, unforgiving points of the key. The small silver key was stamped with a brand name she recognized. It was the exact kind that fit into the most common padlocks used to lock up units at storage centers.
It wasn’t from Lily’s place. She knew that. No one had paid so far in advance that she’d never met them, and the only clients of hers who paid with untraceable money orders were a Korean couple who traveled the US in their RV for three months every summer.
But of the six storage places in nearby towns, five of them were owned by Neighborhood Storage. And Lily was now in charge of inspecting every record and all the properties.
She squeezed the key until it hurt, imagining the hundreds of records and names she’d need to dig through, the dozens of units she’d need to visit, the countless locks she’d need to try.
But she would try. And eventually, she’d find Mendelson’s secrets, and she would expose every one of them to the world, and he’d never, ever be free of them again.
She tucked the key into Amber’s letter and closed it back up in the drawer. But Jones’s letter she carried with her, out into the hall and into Everett’s room, where she slid it under his pillow.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the little boy he’d been. And then she took a deep breath and headed back into the sun to celebrate the incredible young man he was now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Victoria Helen Stone is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Jane Doe and Problem Child in the Jane Doe series; The Last One Home; Half Past; False Step; and Evelyn, After. Winner of the American Library Association’s prestigious Reading List award for outstanding genre fiction, she also published twenty-nine books as USA Today bestselling author Victoria Dahl. Victoria writes in her home office high in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, where she enjoys summer trail hikes almost as much as she enjoys staying inside during the winter. She is also passionate about dessert, true crime, and her terror of mosquitoes. For more information, visit www.victoriahelenstone.com.