The woman stared at me for several seconds before whispering, “My name hasn’t always been Cordelia.” Then she invited me inside and opened an old wooden box filled with photographs. There was Douglas as a teenager, standing beside the same woman decades younger. I finally understood. Cordelia was actually Evelyn, Douglas’s older sister—the woman our family had been told died twenty-seven years earlier after disappearing during a violent marriage. Her abandoned car had been found near a river, and after years without a trace, everyone eventually accepted that she was gone.
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