After losing my oldest daughter, I thought moving to another city might give my family a chance to survive the grief.
Instead, our new home brought an unsettling mystery.
My five-year-old daughter began insisting that she had seen her dead sister standing in the window of the house directly across the street.
At first, I convinced myself it was grief, confusion, or a child’s desperate imagination.
Then I saw the girl myself.
And when I finally discovered who she was, I realized the most disturbing part wasn’t that she looked like my daughter.
It was that my husband already knew her.
And he had chosen our new home for a reason he had never told me.
The apple pie hit the porch before I understood why I’d dropped it.
The ceramic dish shattered near my shoes, sending pieces of white porcelain across the concrete.
I barely noticed.
A girl stood halfway down the stairs inside the house across from mine.
She was looking directly at me.
She had dark hair falling over one shoulder.
For one impossible moment, grief rearranged her face.
My heart stopped.
Because for the briefest second, I thought I was looking at Ava.
My 11-year-old daughter.
The daughter I had buried four months earlier.
“Oh my God, Ava?” I whispered. Then my voice broke into something louder. “What the hell is going on here?”
The woman who had opened the door immediately stepped in front of the girl.
The girl looked frightened.
“I’m Maisie,” she said quietly. “Not Ava.”
I stared at her.
She wasn’t Ava.
Not exactly.
Her face was rounder. Her features were different. But she had Ava’s smile.
And she had my husband’s eyes.
“I’m Maisie. Not Ava,” she repeated.
Then the woman looked at me.
And what she said next made the broken pie at my feet seem like the least important thing happening on that porch.
“You must be Aurora.”
