Katie parked up around the corner from her mother’s house, the car tires squelching in the wet mulch of fallen leaves in the gutter, and then walked the rest of the way on foot. She kept an eye out as she went, but there was nobody else in sight. When she let herself into the apartment, it felt emptier than before. There was an absence in the air and a heaviness to the silence. The familiar corridor stretching away before her was gloomy and still.

“Hello?” she called.

No reply. But it was early of course. Her mother was probably still in bed.

“It’s just me,” she said quietly.

She headed down the corridor to the spare room. The morning light was streaming thinly through the closed curtains, revealing motes of dust hanging in the air. The box remained where she’d left it yesterday on the floor beside the old desk, and nothing in the room appeared to have been touched. Of course, her mother had no reason to come in here. Even if the story was not hers to tell, she already knew it.

And now—after she had asked Alderson about Nathaniel Leland last night—Katie did too.

She walked across and knelt down beside the box and then began to search through everything inside. She found what Alderson had told her was here almost straightaway, only a little way under the news clippings her father had collected about Nathaniel Leland’s murder.

Her hands trembled slightly as she carefully picked up the envelope. It was very old. But while the writing scrawled on the front had faded with time, the words there remained visible, and the weight of them was undiminished by age.

Chris—adoption details.

She felt tightness like a clenched fist in her chest, and opened the flap of the envelope, then pulled out the thin sheaf of folded papers inside and began flicking through them.

There was a certificate of adoption, complete with her brother’s name, Christopher William Shaw, and those of her parents.

There was his original birth certificate.

“William Grace”—Date of birth: April 14, 1985.

And then a sheet explaining the reasons for his adoption.

On April 13, 1986, the child was discovered, having apparently been abandoned, in one of the vestibules of Saint William’s Church on Grace Street. The child’s age was impossible to determine, and so date of birth has been estimated as the date of discovery minus one year. Staff were extremely moved by the circumstances, and the child was provisionally named in reference to them.

Subsequent investigations to establish the child’s identity were comprehensive and exhaustive but failed to uncover his parentage. At the time of writing, such investigations continue, and the prospective adoptive parents are aware of this. With that in mind, we wholeheartedly recommend and endorse the attached application. All our investigations and evaluations suggest Ann and David Shaw, along with their daughter, Katie, will providea loving home for William Grace, and that they are prepared for the eventuality that he may, at some point, be reunited with his birth family, along with whatever complications such a development might entail.

She read the document a second time and then tried to absorb it. Most obviously of all, it didn’t change anything. Her brother was her brother; he always had been and he always would. If anything, this revelation even made sense of some things. The way Chris had always seemed so at odds with the world. Always adrift and out of place. Never quite fitting in. The paperwork in her hand right now didn’t really explain that, of course, but in some strange way it felt like it did.

“So now you know.”

She looked around to see her mother in the doorway, leaning on her cane.

“Chris was adopted,” Katie said.

“Yes.”

“What about me?”

“No.” Her mother shook her head. “Your father and I tried to have children for a long time. It didn’t happen for us, and we gave up hope it ever would. So we applied to adopt—which was when I finally got pregnant. You know what they say about men planning and God laughing. But it seemed right for us to remain on the list; it felt like something we should do. And that’s how your brother ended up coming to us after you were born.”

Katie swallowed.

“Did Chris know?”

“No. Although I always wondered if a part of him suspected. And I assume he knows now. He must have found out when he was looking through the photographs. He was in here for a long time that day. I’m sorry about that. Like I said yesterday, I’d forgotten these things were even here.”

“How did he react?”

Her mother smiled sadly.

“He didn’t mention it. A part of me wishes he had done. We could have spoken about it then. But I hope the reason he didn’t is because he knows it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t, does it?”

“No,” Katie said.

Except that it did. She kept picturing Chris reading these documents and news clippings, and trying to imagine how he would have felt. It doesn’t matter, her mother had just said—and perhaps it didn’t to the two of them. But she thought it would have mattered to Chris. All she could see in her head right then was the sensitive little boy he had been, and she wanted to reach backward in time and hug him. She should have been there for him when he made this discovery. He should have wanted her to be.

And then came a different memory. The four of them visiting her father’s shop that day, when her brother had started across to join her at the barrier and their mother had called out to him but not to her.

Chris, don’t.

It’s dangerous.

“Is this why?” she said.

Her mother shook her head.

“Why what?”

“Why you always loved him more than me?”

She had barely known those words were coming, and a part of her regretted them as soon as she’d spoken them. But another part of her felt relieved—as though she’d been carrying this resentment for such a long time and had finally managed to cast some of it out of her. When her mother understood what she’d said, her face started to crumple. But then she caught herself. She looked down at the cane and began turning it round carefully in her grip. There was something about the movement that suggested all the mistakes of her life—all its disappointments and regrets—were playing out in her mind at once.

“Oh, Katie—” she started.

But then she looked up, over Katie’s shoulder. At the same time, Katie was aware of the light in the room shifting, and she turned to see shadows flitting across the closed curtains.

Footsteps in the garden outside.

And then a moment later, the doorbell rang.

“Wait here,” her mother said.

She turned and disappeared, hobbling awkwardly out of sight down the corridor. With her heart beating faster, Katie crossed the room to the doorway and listened as best she could. Her mother opened the front door.

“Mrs. Shaw?”

A woman’s voice.

“Yes,” her mother said. “We met the other day.”

“That’s right. Detective Pettifer. This is my colleague Sergeant Reece. We’re trying to locate your daughter, Katie.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

Her mother was old and frail, and Katie imagined she was still leaning on her cane for support, but there was the same firmness to her voice she remembered from childhood.

“We’d just very much like to talk to her. And your son as well, of course.”

“I told you I’ve not heard from him in years.”

“What about your daughter?”

Katie leaned against the doorframe.

Waiting.

“She came by yesterday,” her mother said. “I’ve not seen her since.”

“Why was she here?” the woman asked.

“She brings me my shopping. That’s about the only real contact we have anymore. Just doing her duty. She’ll be at home now, I’d guess. You might want to try there.”

If it wasn’t for the cane, Katie could imagine her mother folding her arms at that. There was a moment of silence, and then she heard the distant sound of a radio crackling. It was followed a few seconds later by the noise of feedback, and then quiet and muffled conversation.

She listened carefully.

“Okay,” she heard someone saying quietly. “Okay.”

Then more loudly:

“We’re sorry to have bothered you, Mrs. Shaw. If you do hear from either of your children, we’d very much appreciate you letting us know.”

“Of course.”

A moment later, shadows passed back across the curtains behind her again. She heard the front door close and then the rattle of the chain. She stepped back into the room and waited until her mother appeared back in the doorway again.

“The police are looking for you,” she said.

“I know.”

“But I know you won’t have done anything wrong.”

“Do you though?”

Her mother looked down at the cane again.

“I know full well that—whatever’s happened—it will be because you were trying to do the right thing. To help your brother. To help people. Because that’s what you’ve always done. And I also know I haven’t been as supportive as I could have been.”

She began turning the cane thoughtfully in her hand again.

“But what you said just now,” she told Katie, “it’s not right and it’s not fair. I understand you feeling that way. Perhaps your father and I did treat the two of you differently. And maybe that was because of the manner in which Chris came to us. Sometimes it felt like he’d been left there for us in that church. Like we’d been trusted with something we needed to keep safe.”

The cane was still turning.

“You just told me we never loved you as much as Chris,” she said. “But we did. I do, Katie. It’s just that you were always so confident. So capable. So strong-willed. You knew exactly what you were going to do and you just went right out and did it. But Chris was never like that. And that’s really all there is to it. You never needed our help the way he did.”

Her mother stopped turning the cane and looked up at her.

“But you needed my help just now, I think. And so you had it.”

A beat of silence in the room.

“Thank you,” Katie said. “For that.”

“You’re welcome.”

Katie looked down at the box. The newspaper clippings about Nathaniel Leland were still on top, and she reached down and picked one out.

One of your father’s fancies.

Her mother’s phrasing had disturbed her yesterday, but having learned what she had, she thought she understood now.

“Dad thought this might be Chris?”

“He wondered. Your father was always interested in finding out who Chris really was. He knew it didn’t matter—that Chris was our son, and that was the end of it—but he also thought that one day it might be important for Chris to know where he’d come from. I didn’t really appreciate that at the time. But I do a little more now. People need to know who they are.”

“Why did Dad think this boy might be Chris?”

Her mother shrugged.

“Because Chris came from somewhere. Children don’t simply appear—however much you wish them to. And that little boy, Nathaniel Leland, was about the right age and had vanished at about the right time. That’s all there was to it.”

“But the police must have checked?”

“Yes, of course. We found that out when your father began looking into it. We spoke to the adoption people and they told us the possibility had been investigated and ruled out. The man—that poor missing baby’s father—they took him to see Chris in the hospital, just after he’d been found. And he…”

Her mother trailed off and looked down again.

“What?” Katie said.

Her mother sighed softly.

“Nathaniel Leland’s father screamed at the sight of Chris,” she said. “Screamed as though his whole world had just come apart.”

There was another moment of silence in the room.

And then Katie felt a vibration in her pocket.

Alderson’s phone was ringing.