The pale blue curtains were gone. The bookshelf had collapsed. But the wooden floor remained.
She knelt beside the bed and ran her fingers across the boards until she found one that moved.
Beneath it lay a small metal box.
Inside were three photographs, a hospital bracelet, and a second letter.
This one was addressed to her father.
Emily opened the first photograph.
It showed her mother holding a newborn baby.
Emily recognized the hospital room from the pictures her father kept in the living room.
But there was something wrong.
The date on the back was six months before Emily’s own birth.
And the baby wasn’t Emily.
On the back, in her mother’s handwriting, were four words:
My first little girl.
Emily felt the room begin to spin.
She had always been told that she was an only child.
