Chapter 6 - The Name She Couldn't Say Helen opened an old drawer.
Inside was a faded photograph.
A baby.
Emily.
David stared at it.
Something about the picture disturbed him.
Not because the baby looked familiar.
Because of the expression on his mother's face in the photograph.
She wasn't smiling.
She was staring at Emily as though terrified someone might take her away.
Helen noticed David's reaction.
"Your mother loved her."
David nodded.
"Then why did that love become this?"
Helen sighed.
"Because grief doesn't always make people kinder."
She paused.
"Sometimes it makes them desperate."
David looked at the photograph again.
"What are you not telling me?"
Helen hesitated.
"There was another incident."
"What incident?"
"Emily wasn't the only child your mother tried to control."
David's eyes narrowed.
Helen continued.
"When you were six, you disappeared for almost an entire night."
David remembered nothing.
He had always been told he had been sick.
Helen shook her head.
"You weren't sick."
David felt dizzy.
"Where was I?"
"We don't know."
"How did I come home?"
Helen looked away.
"Your mother brought you back."
That night, David searched through old family records.
He found a newspaper clipping.
A missing-child report.
His own photograph.
His name.
And a date he didn't remember.
His hands began to shake.
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For twenty years, he had believed his childhood memories were incomplete because children simply forgot things.
Now he wondered if someone had wanted him to forget.
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