Chapter 1 - THE GIRL AT THE FENCE
Rachel Mercer knew the necklace before she knew the girl.
It appeared for less than a second.
A silver raccoon slid out from beneath the teenager’s cream hoodie as she leaned across the low wooden fence, one hand holding the red rubber ball that had rolled from her yard into Rachel’s.
Rachel’s glass slipped from her fingers.
It shattered against the patio.
The girl jerked backward.
“Oh my God. I’m sorry.”
Rachel barely heard her.
The necklace swung once against the girl’s chest.
Small silver body.
Black enamel eyes.
A tail curling left instead of right.
Rachel stepped through the broken glass without noticing.
“Where did you get that?”
The girl instinctively caught the pendant in her fist.
“What?”
“That necklace.”
Rachel’s voice sounded wrong even to herself.
Too sharp.
Too desperate.
“I’ve had it since I was little.”
A woman appeared behind the girl.
She had dark blonde hair and wore an olive jacket despite the warm afternoon.
“Emma?”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
The woman looked over the fence.
“We just moved in yesterday. I’m Nora.”
Rachel did not answer.
Ten years collapsed into ten seconds.
Her daughter Lily had been four years old when she disappeared from this backyard.
They had been playing hide-and-seek.
Rachel had stood by the patio table counting loudly while Lily ran giggling toward the hydrangeas.
“Twenty-eight… twenty-nine… thirty.”
Rachel still remembered opening her eyes.
Still remembered the quiet.
Still remembered checking behind the shed, beneath the porch, inside the house.
Still remembered screaming Lily’s name into a neighborhood that suddenly seemed impossibly large.
Lily had been wearing a yellow shirt.
Denim shorts.
Red sneakers.
And a silver raccoon necklace.
Rachel’s father had given it to her two weeks before he died.
There had only been one.
Rachel stared at the teenager.
Fourteen.
The correct age.
Brown hair.
A narrow face that looked unfamiliar until it moved.
Then something in the girl’s eyes made Rachel’s stomach turn.
Emma shifted uneasily.
“Can I have my ball?”
Rachel looked down.
The ball lay near her feet.
She should have picked it up.
She should have introduced herself.
She should have done anything normal.
Instead she heard herself say a word she had not spoken aloud in years.
“Birdie?”
Emma had already turned away.
She stopped instantly.
Not slowly.
Not because Rachel had raised her voice.
She stopped like someone had tugged an invisible string attached to her spine.
Then she looked back.
“Were you calling me?”
Rachel went cold.
Nora’s expression changed.
“Emma?”
“I don’t know.”
Rachel backed toward the patio table.
Her hands shook so violently she knocked against the chair.
Beneath the table sat an old cedar keepsake box.
She had almost thrown it away when she renovated the kitchen five years earlier.
She could not.
Rachel dropped to her knees, dragged it forward and opened the lid.
Birthday cards.
Hospital bracelet.
A pink plastic barrette.
Newspaper clippings.
Missing-person flyers faded around the edges.
And the photograph.
Lily at four, standing on this same patio with chocolate ice cream on her cheek.
Around her neck hung the raccoon.
Rachel carried the picture to the fence.
Emma did not move away this time.
Rachel held it beside her face.
She had imagined this moment thousands of times.
Finding Lily at a train station.
Seeing her through a restaurant window.
Opening the door and discovering her older, changed, alive.
None of those fantasies had prepared Rachel for the terrifying ordinariness of the real possibility.
A teenager next door.
A returned ball.
Late-afternoon sunlight.
Nora took the photograph.
“Who is this?”
“My daughter.”
Nora looked at the four-year-old.
Then Emma.
Rachel forced out the rest.
“She disappeared ten years ago.”
Emma released the necklace.
It fell against her hoodie.
Nora went completely still.
“What was her name?”
“Lily Mercer.”
Emma shook her head immediately.
“My name is Emma.”
Rachel looked at Nora.
Nora’s lips parted, but no words came.
“Tell me where she got the necklace.”
Nora stared at the photograph again.
Rachel saw fear arrive.
Not recognition.
Fear.
“We adopted Emma.”
Rachel could hear her own breathing.
“When?”
Nora swallowed.
“Ten years ago.”
Emma turned toward her mother.
“You said I was four.”
“You were.”
Rachel gripped the fence.
“Where did she come from?”
Nora looked at Emma before answering.
“There was an emergency placement. Then foster care. Then the adoption.”
“What emergency?”
“We were told she’d been found alone.”
“Where?”
“I don’t remember exactly.”
“You adopted a four-year-old and don’t remember where she was found?”
Nora flinched.
Emma’s voice became smaller.
“Mom.”
Nora reached for her daughter.
“They said she’d suffered some kind of head injury.”
Rachel stopped breathing.
Nora continued reluctantly.
“When Emma first came to us, she barely spoke. She knew words, but she couldn’t tell anyone an address. She couldn’t tell them her parents’ names.”
Rachel looked at Emma.
“What could she remember?”
Nora’s eyes filled with something that looked very close to dread.
“Almost nothing.”
Emma unconsciously touched the silver raccoon again.
Nora lowered the photograph.
“The doctors said the memory loss might be temporary.”
Rachel looked at the girl who had answered to Birdie without knowing why.
“Was it?”
Emma answered this time.
“No.”
Behind her stood the house next door.
Ten years earlier, a different family had lived there.
Rachel had watched police search its garage, its shed, its yard.
She had watched volunteers walk the street until after midnight.
She had spent a decade believing Lily had vanished beyond the neighborhood.
Now Rachel stared at the old fence separating the two properties.
May you like
One loose plank near the hydrangeas leaned slightly away from the others.
And for the first time in ten years, Rachel wondered whether Lily had ever left the backyard the way everyone assumed.
