Chapter 4
Over the next month, I spent my days doing two things: Searching for answers and trying to make the house feel like home again.
I had far more success with the second.
Every evening, after unpacking a few more boxes I’d brought home from the storage unit, I hoped I’d stumble across something my mother had left behind.
A journal.
A newspaper clipping.
A letter.
Anything that might explain why she’d waited so long to tell me my father had been murdered.
Instead, I found old tax returns, family photo albums, and enough kitchen gadgets to stock a small restaurant.
Some nights I found myself wondering if I’d imagined the conviction in her voice, returning to my theory that maybe she was confused, or that the medication she was taking had clouded her mind.
I reached a point where I decided I wouldn’t give up looking, but I accepted that the answers weren’t going to reveal themselves overnight.
Instead, I turned my attention to the house. The previous owners had taken excellent care of it, but over the years they’d transformed it into their home, and I wanted to make it feel like mine again.
The first room I tackled was the guest bedroom, which had been my father’s office. After the tour with the real estate agent, I’d stood in the doorway imagining his desk sitting beneath the window once more, and the thought had refused to leave me.
I also hired a contractor to remove the carpeting, hoping the original hardwood floors might still be underneath.
To my delight, they were.
The wood was scratched and dull after years of neglect, but once the floors had been sanded and polished, they looked just as I remembered.
Seeing them again brought a smile to my face.
I painted most of the walls in the house a soft shade of green, which had always been my father’s favorite color.
Over the following weeks, I filled the office with pieces of my father's life I’d discovered inside my mother’s boxes. His brass desk lamp, a framed photograph of my parents taken the year they were married, and several leather-bound books with his name written inside.
The room came together one piece at a time, and by the end of the month, it felt less like a guest bedroom and more like the office I remembered as a little girl. I felt closer to my father there than anywhere else in the house.
Most days, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done in a long time.
Smiling.
The house had given me that.
For the first time since my mother’s death, I no longer felt as though I were drifting through life. I was beginning to put down roots again.
Just after lunch on a Thursday afternoon, there was a knock on the front door, which surprised me. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Setting my paintbrush on a drop cloth, I walked downstairs and opened the door.
A woman stood on the porch holding a covered glass pie dish. She appeared to be somewhere in her late sixties, perhaps early seventies, with silver hair pulled into a loose bun. She wore a pale-blue cardigan despite the warm weather and smiled as though she’d known me for years.
“Hello,” she said. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Not at all.”
“I’ve been meaning to stop by ever since you moved in,” she said. “Sorry it’s taken so long. I live a few houses down. I wanted to come over and say hello and see if there’s anything I can do for you.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Olivia.”
I thought about telling her my last name, my maiden name, and explaining who I was and why I’d bought the house. But for reasons even I couldn’t explain, I didn’t.
“My name is Estelle,” she said.
The name meant nothing to me, but her face was familiar. I couldn’t place it, but I was almost certain I’d seen her before, perhaps when I was little.
“Would you like to come in?” I asked.
“If you’re sure I’m not imposing.”
“I’m sure.”
She stepped inside and looked around. “You’ve already made a lot of changes.”
“I’ve been keeping busy.”
“I can see that.”
I led her into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee while she set the pie on the kitchen counter.
“This place looks wonderful,” she said, glancing toward the hallway. “The previous owners were nice people, but you … you have a decorator’s touch.”
I thanked her, and we carried our coffee into the dining room.
For the next half hour, we talked about ordinary things.
The neighborhood.
The mild summer we’d been having.
Which local restaurants were worth visiting and which weren’t.
After the basic pleasantries had been exchanged, her questions became more personal.
“Do you live here alone?” she asked.
“I do.”
“I suppose we have that in common. I’m divorced.”
“Do you have children?”
Her smile remained, but sadness settled behind it. “I had a daughter, Lara. She disappeared about twenty years ago.”
I stared at her. “Disappeared?”
She nodded. “She was home from college for the weekend. It was a Saturday evening, and she told me she was meeting a few friends.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. And the strange part is, my daughter’s friends insisted she was never with them that night.”
“Did you ever find out?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Were there any witnesses that saw her the night she went missing?”
“None who came forward. The police searched everywhere for months. They never found her. It was as if she had just vanished.”
“I’m so sorry, Estelle.”
“So am I.” She glanced out the front window. “You spend enough years waiting for someone to come home, not wanting to give up hope, and then one day you do because everyone stops looking. You don’t want to accept the inevitable, but sometimes you do because you have no choice.”
We chatted for a few more minutes, and then she stood. “It’s good to meet you, but I feel I’ve taken up enough of your afternoon.”
“You haven’t. It was nice to meet someone who lives in the neighborhood.”
“I’ll let you finish getting settled. We will chat again soon.”
“I’d like that.”
I walked her to the front door, thanking her again for the pie.
She stepped onto the porch. “If you ever need anything, I live in the blue and white house at the end of the hill.”
“And if you ever need anything, you know where to find me.”
I watched her make her way down the walkway toward the sidewalk.
Halfway there, she stopped and turned. “Oh, one more thing. The family who lived here years ago, they had a little girl named Olivia. Same as you.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then she tilted her head. “It’s such a coincidence. Don’t you think?”