“Three days.”
“Who would hide a hospital discharge paper in a towel?” Emily asked, her voice dropping.
Nobody answered her.
The kitchen hummed with the quiet vibration of the refrigerator.
The silence stretched between us as we stared at the two items on the table.
The kitchen clock chimed once for one in the morning.
Emily stood up, her knee popping slightly as she walked toward the hallway.
She returned a moment later carrying a flat cardboard box from the attic.
It was the one where we kept the old family holiday cards and the tax receipts.
“Dad, we owe you the truth about what we found in the attic,” Emily said.
She opened the box and took out an old black-and-white photograph.
She laid it gently beside the silver ring on the table.
The photograph showed a young woman sitting on the stone steps of a large house in Savannah, surrounded by overgrown azalea bushes.
Her face was turned toward the garden, her hand resting on her knee.
“We were looking for our old immunization records last month,” Emily said.
She pointed to the woman’s left hand in the picture.
“This ring has the exact same engraving as the one on Helen’s dresser.”
I stared at the photograph, my chest tightening.
The young woman in the picture was Clara Gable, Helen’s younger sister, though the girls did not know her name.
The ring on her hand was unmistakable, the same heavy letter G that now sat on our kitchen table.
“Who is Helen, Dad?” Grace asked, her short voice demanding an answer.
I cleared my throat, my hand reaching to rub my left wrist where my watch used to sit.
“She was my fiancée,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“She passed away eighteen years ago, just two months before I found the two of you.”
The girls looked at each other, then back at the photograph.
“Why did you never tell us about her family?” Emily asked.
“They did not want anything to do with me after she died,” I said.
“The Gables are an old Savannah family. They made it clear I was not welcome in their lives.”
“I kept her dresser brush and a few photos, but that was all,” I said.
“But if the ring belongs to Helen’s sister,” Grace said, her tapping fingers suddenly stopping against her palm.
“How did it get inside our towel on the beach?” she asked.
“I do not know,” I said.
But the truth was already shifting beneath my feet.
The neat story of a random, lucky discovery on a public beach was dissolving.
The changing stall had not been a random stop.
The girls finally went up to bed at twenty past one.
