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found something. There in the bank she’d planned to visit in a few hours, Jack had found what Camille had come looking for.
    And now her plan to slip in and out of town without him discovering her true intent was about to blow up in her face.
    For a long moment, he watched her in that mistrusting, assessing way all cops had. Then he opened the envelope and dumped its contents onto the small desk. Old documents came first, the parchment paper faded and yellowed, thin, but the official seals still visible. Certificate of marriage, one read. The second: Certificate of live birth.
    Hers.
    “My God.” Trying to process it all, to understand, she extended her hand just as the old Polaroid slipped from the envelope—and the light pink walls started to close in on her.
    There’d been no proof, after all. Until now, there’d been no proof the safe-deposit box remained at the bank after so many years of abandonment. Only a hunch—and a hope.
    “I remember that day,” Jack said as she fingered the picture on top, of her in a pale yellow Easter dress, sitting on her tricycle with ringlets falling against her face, a stuffed lamb tucked under her arm and chocolate smeared on her cheeks. “You were three.”
    It took sheer determination, but somehow she breathed. And somehow she allowed herself to sift past the Easter picture to those below it, all pictures of her and Gabe, their childhood. Special pictures, taken on special days.
    Special pictures that stopped because the special days stopped, nine years after the first picture had been taken.
    Looking up, she found Jack watching her. “I don’t understand…”
    It stunned her how badly she wanted to see one flicker, one trace, of what they’d once meant to each other.
    “Oh, but I think you do,” he said in that horribly quiet voice. “That’s the funny thing about coincidence, ’tite chat. It doesn’t exist.”
    Refusing to let him back her into a corner, she lifted her chin and smiled. “I never said that it did.”
    “You’ve been gone fourteen years, Cami. Fourteen years. That’s a long time. Then suddenly you show up sneaking around Whispering Oaks like—”
    “I wasn’t sneaking. ”
    “The bank is broken into,” he continued in full-interrogation mode, “a safe-deposit box destroyed, and inside I find pictures—of you.”
    Put together that way, it sounded pretty incriminating.
    “What was supposed to be in the box, Cami?”
    The question, so abrupt and simple, the kind any cop would ask, scraped. She looked down at the table, stared at the completely benign image of her on the tricycle. “Not pictures.”
    One step and he was there, tucking a finger to her chin and tilting her face to his. “Tell me.”
    She had to. She knew that. She could lie, but he would know. And if he so much as even suspected she was hiding something, he would keep digging until he found out. If she was the one who measured out the information, then at least she maintained some morsel of control.
    “I don’t know.” That was the truth. “I…” She swallowed as the cold, slow burn of disappointment spread from her throat to her chest. “Not pictures of me.”
    Jack kept watching. “But you expected to find something. That’s why you’re here.”
    The sunlight slipped through the curtains, brighter now, harsher, illuminating nuances she didn’t want to see. “Yes,” she admitted. “I—It was my father’s box. I only found out about it recently. I thought if it was important enough that he kept it a secret, then there must be something in there—”
    “About the night he was killed.”
    “Yes.” There was no point pretending.
    “Last night that man took something from your car.” It wasn’t a question, just a statement of fact—a fact she’d deliberately withheld. “And that something led him to the bank.”
    And now she might never know what her father had gone to great lengths to protect. “My laptop.”
    Jack swore softly. “Damn it, Cami, why