Three weeks after I adopted my husband’s four grieving children, I found his youngest daughter hiding inside a linen closet with their dead mother’s belongings. That night, she clutched my wrist and warned me that Michael was doing to me exactly what he had done to her mommy.
Ellie was crouched behind the bath towels when I opened the linen closet.
She had wedged herself between a basket of spare blankets and the wall, her knees tucked beneath her pink nightgown. An old cardboard box rested beside her, its flaps folded back.
An old cardboard box rested beside her.
The word LAURA had been written across the lid in faded black marker.
Ellie shoved the lid closed so quickly that a stack of photographs slid onto the floor.
“Daddy said we can’t look.”
I knelt beside her.
