Page 78 of Dotted Lines (Runaway 5)

He nodded. “I’ll have my realtor draw it up today.”

“Great.” I shook his hand once more, waited until he was gone, then headed for the shack.

August was sitting at the same table where I’d once sat with Lou. He looked bored out of his mind with one hand holding up his head. When he spotted me, he sat up straight. “Can we go now?”

“Soon,” I promised. “Where’s your mom?”

“Back here,” Clara called.

I found her in what had been Lou’s office. Or library. Or notebook-hoarding room. “Um . . . whoa.”

There were spiral-bound notebooks stacked against the walls in towering columns. Some almost as tall as me. Three bookshelves against the wall were so overloaded with books and binders that the shelves sagged in the middle beneath the weight.

“What’s in these?” I slid a notebook off the top of a stack and opened it to the first page. It was a series of numbers on the left side with a sketch of a car’s grill that took up the center. It had the make, model and year of the car it would have belonged to. At the bottom was a location. Zone 4.

“I think he had this entire place cataloged.” Clara had a few notebooks open on Lou’s desk, flipping through them. Page after page was more of the same. “I bet he knew what and where every single piece was. These were his treasures.”

I shook my head, unable to believe all that I was seeing. Lou must have spent years in here, detailing every scrap and every part on this property. I put the notebook back on t

he stack, then left the office, wandering deeper into the shack. Lou’s bedroom was at the rear of the building, and unlike the rest of his home, it was clutter-free.

Everything was filmed with dust, but the emptiness of the room was utterly shocking.

A bed rested in the center of the space, pushed against the far wall. On either side were two nightstands. One held a box. The other a framed photograph. The picture drew me in, and I skirted the bed to get a closer look.

It was of Lou, barely recognizable as a younger man, seated with a woman wearing a yellow polka-dot dress. His wife. He had a smile on his face. He looked happy. He’d been a different man.

In a different life.

“When he lost her, he lost his way.” Clara had snuck up on me and was peeking past my shoulder. With a sad smile, she went to the other nightstand, running her fingertips over the dusty box. Then she flipped the clasp to lift the lid and gasped at whatever was inside. “Karson.”

“What?” I rounded the bed to her side, the photograph of Lou and his wife still in my grip. There wasn’t much to save here but this picture was definitely coming home.

“It’s a letter. To you.” She lifted it out, then narrowed her gaze at whatever else was in the box. “Wait. There are more.”

She pulled out a stack of letters, sifting through them. Each had one of our names on top. Six letters for the six kids who’d lived here. There was more in the box, but my focus was on Lou’s neat and tidy script and the envelopes in Clara’s hands.

“Oh my God.” She rifled through the stack again.

“I can’t believe it.”

She nodded. “He even spelled Londyn’s name right. With a y. I didn’t know he actually knew our names.”

I blinked, unable to process what I was seeing.

“He left them for you to find,” she said. “He put all of his stuff in the other rooms, but this one was clean because he wanted you to see this box and that photo.”

Lou. I wished I’d known him better. I wished I’d come back again before he’d passed. “He noticed more than he let on, didn’t he?”

“I think he noticed everything.”

I tore my eyes away from the letters and met Clara’s gaze. We were close. Too close. My chest brushed against her arm. Her hair, left long, draped between us and the ends tickled my forearms.

God, she was beautiful. Her tender heart. Her unwavering strength. I soaked her in, giving myself a moment to swim in those chocolate eyes.

My hand lifted, my fingertips desperate to trace the soft line of her jaw, when little feet pounded at our backs.

“Mom!”