I sipped my mocha on the ride home, savoring the rich, sweet chocolate underlain by the bitter bite of coffee. Annabelle had a gift. I knew my way around a portafilter. I’d worked as a barista enough to know the difference between competence and talent.

I was good, but Annabelle could craft coffee drinks that made my taste buds roll over and beg for mercy, especially when she brought out the chocolate. I could live on her mochas. The drink was a nice distraction from our destination.

Riley pulled around the side of Winters House and reached for the remote to open the garage door. "Keep going," I said, gesturing to the narrow extension of the driveway that led past the garage, past the main house, to the two cottages on the east side of the property where Mrs. W and Mr. Henried—the gardener—lived.

Slowing, Riley followed the drive past the pool and pool house to the cottages. While the pool house matched the main house in style, with its warm cream walls and red tile roof, the cottages, set into the woods out of sight of Winters House, had a different look altogether. Instead of Mediterranean, like Winters House, they were built in a craftsman style. Wide front porches, stained shingles, stone work on the steps and around the foundation. Homey and welcoming.

My father had chosen the same style for his house, albeit on a much grander scale. We followed the road past the cottages, circling behind the pool and gardens of Winters House. The woods closed around us, blocking out the midday spring sunshine. Growing up, I’d loved these woods, playing beneath the trees, climbing them with my brothers and building forts with fallen branches.

I'd felt safe here, unaware of the danger that could lurk in the shadows. After my parents died, I'd wanted the graceful discipline of the main house. The manicured gardens over the wild of the woods. I hadn't ventured this close to my parent’s house in years. Not from the driveway, and not down the path through the woods.

Riley drove around the last curve of the drive, and the house appeared, nestled in the trees, looking as if we'd walked out the door only hours before. He pulled to a stop in front of the porch and studied the house.

"Not what I was expecting," he said. "No one lives here?"

"No. None of us—" I broke off, swallowed hard. Trying again, I said, "Mrs. W and Mr. Henried take care of it, but no one lives here."

I could understand his confusion. The garden beds in front of the porch were neatly weeded, the bushes trimmed and the peonies in bloom. The house itself was in perfect condition. I'd forgotten how beautiful it was, the way it nestled into the trees, the stone pillars and cedar shingles glowing with warmth.

Like the cottages, it was a craftsman style, but my father had been a Winters, and our house had been no cottage. Built on a grand scale, it had a deep wraparound porch, arched windows with hand carved shutters, and a slate roof accented by the flash of copper gutters and downspouts. Inside, the great room soared two stories, with a massive stone fireplace on one end and a view of the woods on the other.

Pulling the house keys from my purse, I opened the door of the SUV and jumped out. As far as I knew, nothing had been touched in the house in over a decade. Maybe not since we'd moved out. I'd come back a few times as a teenager, missing my parents, but the house was too empty without them.

The air inside smelled stale and flat. The interior was in perfect condition, the furniture uncovered, magazines still arranged on the coffee table, but the house still felt abandoned.

The front door opened into a foyer, the staircase to the second floor on one side and the hall to the kitchen and family room on the other. I ignored both and walked straight ahead into the great room. I didn't know what I was looking for. Anything personal would be in the master bedroom, or my father's office. I wasn't ready to face those rooms yet.

I stood in the center of the great room, Riley beside me, and turned in a slow circle, absorbing my childhood home. It had been years, but something was off. Deliberately, I turned in a second circle, studying the room—the pictures on the mantle, the leather couch and matching armchairs, and rustic style coffee table. The reading nook with bookshelves and chaise lounge, the door to my father's office, the half wall dividing the great room from the kitchen.

Everything looked the same, but something was missing.

I crossed the room to the fireplace and studied the mantle. My mother had filled it with family photographs. Everyone was there—her parents, my father's parents, their wedding pictures. My brothers and I, Uncle Hugh, Aunt Olivia, my cousins. There had barely been any space left when I was a little girl, and still, she found spots to add more.

Some of the photographs were missing. The picture of my mother taken the day she graduated from medical school. The one of her holding me in the hospital, my dad in the background holding Vance, my mother looking weary, her blue eyes shining with joy.

"What is it?" Riley asked, examining the photographs along with me.

"Some of the pictures are missing," I said. I stepped up onto the stone hearth to get closer to the mantle and pointed to the empty spaces. "Here and here."

"Pictures of your mother? And you?"

"Yes," I confirmed. I discovered another spot missing a picture, one of me on my first day of kindergarten. I could see it in the back of my mind—my hair the same platinum as my mother's and pulled back into two tight braids. I’d been wearing a red pinafore with a butterfly stitched on the front, my grin half excited and half terrified.

"Would your aunt have taken some of the pictures to the house?" Riley asked, gently.

I shook my head. "Aunt Olivia loved pictures as much as my mom did," I said. "She had a ton of her own. She left these here, she told me, for us. For when we were ready to come home. To go through all of it."

"And you never were?" Riley asked, surprise in his voice.

I reached out a finger and stroked it down the side of a gilded frame holding a picture of my parents on their wedding day. "No. Gage and I were gone. Until the last few years, Vance was more interested in drinking. Tate was so young when they died, he doesn't really remember living here. If Olivia and Hugh were still alive, it would've been different. I think we could have faced it. Maybe one of us would've come home already, would've been living in this house. Instead, we all fell apart."

"Someone was here. Someone took those photographs. The question is," Riley said, taking a slow survey of the house, curiosity in his eyes, "what else did they take?"

We searched the whole house, but other than the missing photographs, it was impossible to pin down what might be gone. After so many years I had no idea what had been in my father's desk drawers or my mother's dresser.

Riley shook his head at the carelessness of leaving her jewelry in its cabinet in her walk-in closet, unlocked in an empty house. He was right. To anyone else, the diamonds and gold would've been too valuable to leave unguarded. Gage had her wedding ring, had given it to Sophie, but the rest of it—they were just rocks and metal.

The people inside were the real treasures of a home. There was no one here but ghosts.

I left Riley in my father's closet and went to check my old bedroom. I was half afraid I'd find something weird, like flowers or a note, some message from whoever had been in the house, but everything was untouched, perfect.

It looked as if eight-year-old me had skipped out just that morning and could walk in any second. My hair ribbons were tied neatly beside the mirror of the little girl’s white vanity table, snapshots from summer camp still tucked into the side of the mirror.

I sank onto the edge of the bed, blinking hard, fighting back tears. I loved this house. We'd been so happy here. We shouldn't have left it like this, abandoned. My parents wouldn't have wanted that. They'd designed every inch of our home, created it out of love as a haven for their family. It would've broken their hearts to know that we’d turned our backs on it.

But they hadn’t known they’d die here, murdered on a cool spring night by a killer who would never be caught. They hadn’t known they’d leave us, or that Uncle Hugh and Aunt Olivia would follow them less than nine years later.

"You okay?"

Riley stood in the doorway. I shrugged a shoulder and shook my head, unable to answer and unwilling to meet his eyes.

"I like your room," he said. "It looks like you. Were you taking pictures even back then?"

I watched him at my dresser, studying the ancient and very basic SLR camera sitting on top. It had been my first, a gift from my grandfather. I'd had to save up my allowance to get the film developed and I’d carefully framed each shot, afraid to waste them. That simple camera and the cost of developing the pictures had taught me so much about photography.

I’d stopped taking pictures for a few years after my parents had died, unable to open myself up enough to get interested in hobbies. When Aunt Olivia bought me a camera years later, she'd gotten something newer. Something with no memories attached.

"I think I was always taking pictures,” I said. “I started with my mom's 35mm, bugging her to let me hold it every time she took it out. Everything always made more sense through the viewfinder."

Riley stroked a finger across the top of the camera. When he sat on the end of the bed beside me and wrapped his arm around my shoulders, my heart squeezed hard, but I leaned into him. Just for a minute, I needed his strength.

I didn't want to be here anymore. I didn't want to miss them like this. The house was too much the same. It looked as if any minute they’d come in, telling us to hurry up for school or set the table for dinner. I half expected to hear my mom’s voice, calling up the stairs for us to get a move on before breakfast got cold.

A tear slid down my cheek. Riley said only, "Lise," and held me tight to his side. I let my head rest on his shoulder, giving myself just a minute. A minute to breathe in his woodsy, spicy scent. A minute to let him hold me.

I wished that they were still here.

I wished things hadn’t gone so wrong with Riley.

I wished I’d never left home.

A thousand wishes for things to be different and not one of them would come true.

The minute was up far too soon. I forced myself to stand, to step away. He reached for me, and I dodged him, twisting from his hand.

"I can't," I said, keeping distance between us when he would've moved closer. “I can pretend with you in public, but not when we’re alone.”

“I’m not pretending, Lise. I—”

I squeezed my eyes closed shutting him out. I couldn’t do this, couldn’t hear his excuses right now. Not in this house, surrounded by all I’d lost.

Riley cut off and fell silent. Moving to the door, he said, “Let’s go. There’s nothing to see here.”

I followed him out, more than ready to leave. At that moment I would have happily agreed never to enter the house again. If I’d known how soon I’d be back, I would have started running and never stopped.