Page 70 of Written with You (The Regret Duet 2)
I was happy.
I was in love.
I had a big day planned with brunch, bear claws, and Rosalee.
The garage could wait.
“Yep, everything seems to be okay out there,” I said, shutting the door.
Caven eyed me warily, but I strategically ignored it. We had time to deal with that later.
Our next stop was my studio, and oh holy fuck. Paint was everywhere. Pictures that had once been stacked against the wall were broken and torn to shreds to the point where I couldn’t see the floor. I had insurance. I wouldn’t file it though. They were all just a bunch of junk. In a way, it was liberating to see them lying there. At least now I could stop trying to be someone I wasn’t.
No. The symbolism wasn’t lost on me.
“Damn,” I mumbled, pointing to the blank space on the wall where the picture of Rosalee had once hung. It had no doubt met its untimely demise and was hidden somewhere in the rubble.
“Don’t worry,” Caven said. “That one was just a bad reproduction. I bought the original.” He winked.
A loud bubble of laughter sprang from my throat. “Sure you did.”
We made our way up the stairs. It was strange the way everything was in its place, not even a crooked painting in the hallway. However, my bedroom was a disaster area. It was a lot like the garage with the exception that my clothes and shoes and jewelry were strewn everywhere. How they expected me to know if anything was missing was beyond me.
Though one thing caught my attention. The photo albums that had once been stacked on my dresser were now stacked on the floor.
Not thrown or ripped.
Stacked.
My stomach dropped as I waded into the wreckage. I’d told Caven that it was all just stuff, but those pictures were irreplaceable. I’d digitized everything over the years, but there was nothing like holding the very same image my mother or father had once held. Their invisible thumbprints still graced the corners, and I often held them without even looking at the photo just to feel close to them again.
“Babe?” Caven called as I sat down and cracked open the album on top.
A picture of my father sitting on the couch, reading Hadley and me a book, greeted me on the first page.
“It’s okay,” I said, blowing out a ragged breath and tracing my fingers over my sister’s smile.
That picture had been taken three days before my parents were killed. I’d found it on a roll of film still in my mother’s camera shortly after I’d been released from the hospital. I’d cried for hours when we’d gotten the pictures back from the photo lab because the majority of them were of Hadley and me playing outside. I’d had my sister. I hadn’t needed pictures of her. What I’d needed was for that roll of film to be filled with new images of my mother and my father. Seconds frozen in time of them laughing and smiling so I could lie to myself and pretend like they were still alive. A familiar coping mechanism for me.
I turned the page. More of Hadley. More of my father. More of me. One page at a time, I flipped to the end, making sure nothing had been damaged.
However, it was the very last page of that album that ruined us all.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed, tracing my finger over the blank spot where the final image of my parents alive had once been.
It was the picture snapped in the mall, literally one second before my father died. My grandfather had gone through hell and back to get that little disposable camera from the police for me and my sister. While that picture had provided me quite a bit of comfort on dark nights, knowing my dad had been happy until the very end, it had destroyed Hadley’s life.
“What’s wrong?” Caven asked, squatting beside me.
“He stole my picture.”
“What?”
I pointed at the empty space. “My picture. The one of my parents the day at the mall.”
His brows furrowed. “Are you sure it was there? You didn’t take it out or anything?”
“No. It’s always been right there. I took some of the other ones out to show Rosalee, but I never moved that one.”
“Why would anyone want to steal that picture?”
“I don’t know.” I dug my phone out of my back pocket and opened my photos.
It had been a long time, and I didn’t keep many photos of my parents on my phone, but over the last few months, I’d saved dozens of Hadley’s texts from over the years. Unfortunately, she’d sent that one photo more than anything else. Always circling the blurry woman in the background in various zooms and crops.
I found the image I was looking for and passed my phone to Caven.
There were some things that I would remember for the rest of my life.
