The Postcard
The postcard arrived written in dead girl's handwriting. "I never left. Room 77. Come find me. K." But Kira Novak drowned seven years ago, her body pulled from Ashford Harbor the night I fled with my infant daughter and sanity hanging by threads. I am Mara Thornton now, a woman who rebuilt herself from ashes, who teaches her six year old that monsters are not real while checking every lock three times before sleep. The postcard shatters everything. My ex husband Dominic calls within hours, his voice sliding through the phone like poison, reminding me how unreliable my memory has always been. Then Ethan Chen appears at my bakery door, my first love who vanished twelve years ago, holding an identical postcard and eyes full of questions I cannot answer. Someone is playing with my mind, or Kira survived and has been watching me from the shadows. As I return to Ashford searching for truth, memories surface that I spent years drowning. Dominic's hands around my throat. Blood on my dress. Kira screaming from the water while I stood frozen on the pier. But which memories are real and which did Dominic plant during five years of making me question my own name? The deeper I search, the more I unravel. A journal in my handwriting describes events I know happened differently. My daughter draws pictures of a shadow man who visits our apartment, though I have never seen him. Ethan swears he will protect me, but I cannot remember why we stopped speaking, and Dominic smiles like he knows exactly why. My mind is not safe. My daughter is not safe. And somewhere in this town built on silence, the truth waits to either set me free or prove I was crazy all along.