Free The Lake House by Kate Morton

was ever found.”
    â€œAnd the family never came back?”
    â€œNever.”
    â€œThey didn’t sell the house?”
    â€œNot as far as I’m aware.”
    â€œStrange,” Bertie said, “just to let it sit there, locked and lonely, all this time.”
    â€œI expect it was too sad for them,” Louise said. “Too many memories. One can only imagine what it’s like to lose a child. All that grief, the sense of impotence. I can understand why they’d have fled the scene, decided to make a fresh start somewhere else. A clean break.”
    Sadie murmured agreement. She didn’t add that in her experience, no matter how hard a person ran, no matter how fresh the start they gave themselves, the past had a way of reaching across the years to catch them.
    * * *
    That evening, in the room Bertie had made up for her on the first floor, Sadie took out the envelope, just as she had the night before and the one before that. She didn’t slip the letter from inside, though. There was no need; she’d memorised its contents weeks ago. She ran a thumb over the front, the message written in capital letters above the address: do not bend, photograph inside . She’d memorised the picture, too. Proof. Tangible evidence of what she’d done.
    The dogs shifted at the foot of her bed and Ramsay whimpered in his sleep. Sadie laid a hand on his warm flank to calm him. “There now, old fellow, everything’s going to be all right.” It crossed her mind she was saying it as much for herself as for him. Fifteen years the past had taken to find her. Fifteen years in which she’d focused on moving forwards, determined never to look back. Incredible, really, that after all her efforts to build a barrier between then and now, it only took one letter to bring it down. If she closed her eyes, she could see herself so clearly, sixteen years old and waiting on the brick wall out the front of her parents’ neat semi-detached. She saw the cheap cotton dress she’d been wearing, the extra coat of lip gloss, her kohl-rimmed eyes. She could still remember applying it, the smudgy stub of eye pencil, her reflection in the mirror, her desire to draw circles thick enough to hide behind.
    A man and woman Sadie didn’t know—acquaintances of her grandparents, was all she’d been told—had come to collect her. He’d stayed in the driver’s seat, polishing the black steering wheel with a cloth, while she, all pearlescent coral lipstick and bustling efficiency, had climbed out of the passenger seat and trotted around to the kerb. “Morning,” she’d called, with the strident cheer of someone who knew she was being helpful and rather liked herself for it. “You must be Sadie.”
    Sadie had been sitting there all morning, having decided there was no point staying inside the empty house and being unable to think of anywhere else she’d rather go. When the henna-haired social worker first gave her the details of when and where to wait she’d considered not turning up, but only for a minute; Sadie knew this was the best option she had. She might have been foolish—her parents never tired of telling her she was—but she wasn’t stupid.
    â€œSadie Sparrow?” the woman persisted, a thin lace of perspiration on the blonde hairs above her top lip.
    Sadie didn’t answer; her compliance had limits. She tightened her mouth instead and pretended great interest in a flock of starlings soaring through the sky.
    The woman, for her part, remained splendidly undeterred. “I’m Mrs Gardiner, and that’s Mr Gardiner up front. Your Grandma Ruth asked us to collect you seeing as neither she nor your grandad drive, and we were only too happy to help. We’re neighbours, and as it happens we spend quite a bit of time out this way.” When Sadie said nothing, she nodded her lacquered hair-do in the direction of the British