Copyright 2026 by DJ Rawlings

CHAPTER THREE

The Red Door

On Sunday morning, I dropped an earring into the sink and had to cover the drain before I could retrieve it.

Jake stood in the bathroom doorway. “Let me.”

“I can put on an earring.”

“I was offering to drive.”

I held the silver hoop between fingers that refused to steady. In the mirror, he watched me make another attempt. His hair was still damp from the shower, except for the section at his crown that never stayed down.

“Sarah’s coming,” I said.

“I know. You could both come back here afterward. I’ll get lunch.”

The offer was so ordinary that I nearly accepted it as an excuse not to go. We could have lunch now. I could call Sterling and say I was ill. He would probably prefer it.

He had listened to my request on Monday without interrupting. When I finished listing the things we hoped to find, he was silent long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped. Then he said there were boxes on the third floor. Sunday at ten would be convenient. He offered nothing about what they contained.

I fastened the earring and put its mate on without difficulty.

“We don’t know how long we’ll be,” I told Jake.

“I can get lunch late.”

I turned away from the mirror. “I want to bring something home.”

He waited.

“Something of mine. Mom has boxes of schoolwork from after the hospital. Even the ugly things I made in art class. I can go to their house and find a spelling test from fourth grade, but I don’t have anything from before.”

Jake took my hand. “Then I hope he kept it.”

The intercom buzzed before I could answer. Sarah came upstairs while I found my coat and checked my purse for the little notebook Janie had suggested bringing. At Thursday’s appointment, we had worked out what to do if I became overwhelmed. I could step outside. I could leave. I did not have to finish looking through every box simply because my uncle had agreed to let me come.

Knowing that had helped in Janie’s office. At home, I kept checking whether the notebook was still in my purse.

Sarah appeared in the doorway wearing a coat she had buttoned unevenly. “Ready?”

“Almost.”

She caught me examining the buttons and fixed them. “I know. I’ve already had to go back for my keys.”

Jake took my coat from the hook. “Call if you need me.”

I kissed him and held on a little longer than I intended. Sarah found something interesting in her purse until I stepped away.

* * *

Outside Boston, the houses retreated behind stone walls and bare trees. Sarah drove with the navigation instructions turned louder than necessary. Each time the voice interrupted us, she lowered it another notch until we could barely hear the turn we needed.

“Have you spoken to him since Monday?” she asked.

“No.”

“He didn’t ask why we suddenly wanted to go?”

“He didn’t ask much of anything.”

“Sounds like him.”

She slowed for a bend. Wet leaves clung to the road, and I braced my hand against the door until the car straightened. Sarah noticed but said nothing.

Our parents had been dead for twenty years. Sterling was our father’s younger brother, the person everyone seemed to agree should explain what happened afterward. Yet he was the person we had asked least. I knew the official reasons he had not raised us: he was unmarried, he traveled, he could not provide the care three traumatized children needed. Sarah had never accepted any of them.

“He managed to keep the company going,” she said. “And that enormous house.”

“A company isn’t three children.”

“No. It pays you.”

I turned toward the window. Mom Jenson had always corrected Sarah when she said Sterling had not wanted us. Not taking us did not mean he had not wanted us. I understood what Mom was trying to give us, but I had never managed to believe it entirely.

“I’m not going to fight with him,” Sarah said.

“I didn’t ask you not to.”

“You were about to.”

“I thought I’d wait until we got there.”

She smiled, briefly. Then the navigation system directed us onto a narrow road between two old walls, and neither of us spoke again until we reached the gate.

A camera angled down toward Sarah’s window. She pressed the intercom and gave our names. The man who answered said we were expected. A mechanism rattled inside one stone pillar, and the iron gates swung inward.

The drive curved between clipped hedges before opening onto a lawn broad enough to make the house seem distant. It was gray stone and dark timber, with tall windows and a steep roof above the third floor. Sarah parked near the front steps and switched off the engine.

“Anything?” she asked.

I studied the windows. A chimney rose beyond the left gable; a narrow path ran around the side of the house. I could have been looking at a property listing. Nothing told me which room had been mine or where my mother might have stood to call us in.

“No.”

Sarah left the keys in her lap. “We can give it ten minutes.”

“Let’s at least get inside.”

Gravel shifted beneath my boots. By the front steps, my breathing was too fast, and I concentrated on the brass studs in the door while Sarah reached for the bell. Twelve across the top panel. Eight below the knocker.

The door opened before she touched anything.

“Ms. Sarah. Ms. Stella.” The man inside was tall and white-haired, in a charcoal suit without a tie. “Alfred Hale. I manage the household for Mr. Samson.”

He stepped aside. Sarah remained on the threshold.

“Were you here when we lived here?”

“No, ma’am. Mr. Samson hired me after he assumed responsibility for the estate.”

“You didn’t know our parents?”

“Not personally.”

“Thank you,” I said, and followed him in before Sarah could ask him to account for anything else.

The foyer smelled of beeswax. A staircase curved up to a balcony, its railing polished smooth where hands had passed over it. Paintings filled the walls beneath a chandelier that seemed too small for the space. I had expected to recognize something once we were inside. Instead, I was conscious of the damp marks my boots had left on the floor.

“Stella.”

Sterling approached from a corridor to the right. He wore a navy jacket over an open-necked white shirt. At the wedding, he had seemed older, but perhaps it was the formal suit or the fact that I had barely spoken to him.

“Sarah.” He stopped a few feet away. “Good morning.”

“Thank you for letting us come,” I said.

“Of course. You have a right to see what was kept.”

Sarah unfastened her coat. “What was kept?”

“Alfred will show you. I have an engagement in the city.”

“You’re leaving?”

“I’m afraid so.” Sterling adjusted his cuff. “You may take anything that belonged to you or your siblings. If there are documents relating to the company or the estate, leave them until counsel can review them.”

“We came for family things,” I said.

“Then there should be no difficulty.” He turned to Alfred. “They won’t need you to remain upstairs.”

“Very good, sir.”

Sterling picked up a briefcase from the hall table. I had questions about our parents, but he was already preparing to leave, and the politeness I had learned as a child made it hard to stop him.

“Did you spend much time with us?” I asked.

His hand paused on the handle. “I was in the military for much of your early childhood.”

“But you knew us.”

“Naturally.”

I waited. He glanced toward the stairs.

“There may be photographs. Some could be difficult for you.”

“Why?”

“You may not remember the people in them.” He moved toward the door, then stopped beside me. “Take your time. If you have questions afterward, we can arrange to talk.”

Sarah watched him leave. Only after the car started outside did she take off her coat completely.

“We made an appointment for this,” she said.

Alfred held out his arm for the coat. “The third floor is this way.”

* * *

The main staircase led to a carpeted corridor. Beyond it, a plain door concealed a narrower flight of wooden steps. Alfred went first. Sarah followed, leaving enough room that I did not have to keep pace with her.

As we climbed, the smell of polish gave way to dry timber and old paper. At the top stood a single door painted deep red. Alfred moved aside for us.

“I’ll be downstairs if you require anything.”

His footsteps receded. Sarah remained beside me on the landing, waiting while I rested my hand on the knob. The brass was cold. I was twenty-seven, in my uncle’s house, with my sister. I could hear a car somewhere outside.

I opened the door.

Pale light entered through a window at the far end of a wide room beneath the sloped roof. Someone had swept the center of the floor. Along the walls, boxes stood in uneven rows, some stacked beneath old furniture draped in cloth. A wooden trunk had been shoved under the lowest part of the ceiling. On its lid sat a cardboard carton with three names written in black ink.

SARAH. STELLA. SAM.

I had expected dust and things I could not remember. I had not expected to find our names together, as ordinary as a label on a moving box.

Sarah crouched beside the trunk and worked a fingernail beneath the yellowed tape. It split, leaving strips of paper stuck to the cardboard. I helped her lift the carton onto the floor.

Children’s clothes filled it. A pair of tights had been rolled inside a shoe. Beneath them lay a red sweater, folded with its sleeves across the front. Sarah lifted it by the shoulders.

“This one.”

She had told me about the sweater before. Now she held it against her blouse, too small to reach her waist.

“What do you remember?” I asked.

“Hating it.” She touched the collar. “I think it scratched.”

The collar had a woolen edge stiff enough that I understood the complaint. Sarah folded it carefully, although there was no reason to keep it neat. Nobody would wear it again.

I chose a shoe from the box and turned it over. Dirt remained in the tread. Someone had worn the heel down on one side, then outgrown it or lost the chance to. I could not tell whether it had been mine.

“We should make piles,” I said. “Things to take. Things we’re unsure about.”

Sarah put the sweater beside her. “I’m taking this.”

The next carton contained school papers. We settled on the floor and passed them between us. Sarah identified work by the handwriting until I made her check the names. On one sheet, STELLA had been printed carefully above a row of sums. I had erased one answer hard enough to tear the paper.

“That’s definitely yours,” she said.

“I might have become less particular.”

She gave me a look and continued sorting.

There were paintings with the paper buckled by too much water, a drawing of a dog, a shape assembled from colored scraps. Tape still held its corners together.

“You hated glue,” Sarah said. “It got on your hands.”

“Do you remember that, or does it sound like me?”

She considered the question. “I’m not sure.”

We put it in my pile anyway.

The animals, she thought, belonged to Sam. She remembered him talking about dogs and inventing stories about rooms in the house that nobody else knew about. As she said it, her attention drifted toward the sloping wall.

“What rooms?”

“Secret ones. Or passages.” She rubbed her forehead. “That might have been a book. I read so much after we went to the Jensons’.”

I wanted to ask more. Instead, I wrote down what she had said, leaving space beneath it. She watched until I closed the notebook, then reached for another box.

* * *

The photographs had been packed loosely between sheets of tissue. Some had curled. Others stuck together at the edges, and we separated them with care, taking far longer than we had with the schoolwork.

Sarah identified a little blonde girl beside a birthday cake as me. Once she said it, I could see the likeness, although the girl’s broad, unguarded smile seemed unfamiliar. In another picture I stood in front of a piano. A dark-haired boy had turned away near the edge of the frame. Sarah thought he was Sam. He appeared again in a blurred photograph of children running across the lawn, but his face was no clearer.

I began putting pictures aside without deciding whether to take them. There were people in the backgrounds, adults whose names I did not know. I wanted to ask someone about each of them. Sterling was in the city, and Alfred had never known them.

Near the bottom of the box, I found my parents on a terrace. My mother leaned into my father with one hand on his chest. He was smiling at the photographer. The photograph the Jensons had given us showed them dressed formally, facing forward. Here his collar was open, and my mother had apparently said something funny just before the shutter clicked.

I brought it closer to the window.

“Stella?”

My father’s face had the same broad planes as Sterling’s. The resemblance was less obvious in the formal portrait at home. Here, with his head turned and one eyebrow lifted, it was difficult to ignore.

“The man in the nightmare,” I said. “I thought he was Dad.”

Sarah set down the pictures she was holding.

“He was standing still while everything burned. I couldn’t make him come to me.” I turned the photograph toward her. “Look at his face. Think about Sterling twenty years younger.”

She studied it without speaking.

“They were brothers,” she said eventually.

“I know.”

“What are you saying?”

I lowered my voice, though Alfred was two floors below us. “Maybe it was Sterling.”

Sarah glanced at the open door. “Why would you dream about him?”

“I don’t know.”

She handed back the picture. I made myself record the thought before I examined the face again. I had dreamed of a man, then seen a resemblance in a photograph. I could put down the sequence accurately even if I could not stop wondering what it meant.

We worked without talking for a while. I kept the photograph beside my knee, faceup. Every time I reached for another, my attention returned to it.

“Here,” Sarah said at last.

She had opened a plastic bin against the wall. From it she lifted a black drawing pad, its corners bent and its spiral rusted in places. SAM had been written across the cover in silver.

She brought it to me. “Will you?”

I opened it on the floor between us. A pencil drawing of a sleeping dog filled the first page. The boy who drew it had pressed hard around the ears and muzzle, then used lighter strokes along the animal’s back. Beneath the table, the paws overlapped awkwardly. I liked that small mistake. It made the drawing easier to imagine someone working on.

The dog ran through grass on the next page. After that came a tree bent in the wind and a boat on water darkened with graphite. Gray smears marked the lower edges of several sheets.

Then Sarah appeared, sitting cross-legged with a book in her lap. He had left one hand unfinished, but the concentration in her face was familiar. Her eyebrows drew together in the same way now as she leaned over it.

“He drew me.”

She touched the blank margin. I waited until she lifted her hand before turning the page.

Two dark-haired boys faced a tall house. Heavy lines crossed the building from side to side, continuing through places where walls should have stopped them. One boy held a small square object near his face. The pencil shading was so dark that I could not make out its edges clearly.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A toy?”

“And these?” I traced the air above the lines.

Sarah leaned closer. “I don’t know.”

She studied the two boys. “The people who worked here had a son. Maybe Sam drew him.”

“Do you remember him?”

“Only what I read afterward. He died with his parents.”

Neither boy faced us. I turned the pad slightly, trying to make out the object one of them held.

I left the pad open. She returned to the bin and lifted out a flat bundle wrapped in cloth. One corner caught on the plastic rim, and I reached to help her. A wooden picture frame emerged, its glass covered in dust.

Sarah wiped it with her sleeve. Three children stood in a living room. On the left, she wore a striped dress and uneven pigtails. The girl in the center had my eyes, my round childhood cheeks, one shoulder pressed against the boy beside her.

“Sam,” Sarah said.

“Are you sure?”

She bent over the glass. “It’s us. It must be.”

I took the frame. The boy was thin and dark-haired, with his shoulders tipped forward as though he had been caught on the verge of leaving. A section of hair rose near the crown of his head.

Jake had been standing in the bathroom doorway when I kissed him goodbye. The patch of hair I could never smooth was in the same place.

I shifted the frame away from the window’s reflection. The boy’s nose was straight, his upper lip slightly uneven. I tried to look at the three children together, but my attention kept returning to his mouth, then his eyes.

“What is it?” Sarah asked.

I could not answer. A child could resemble anyone. There had to be thousands of boys with dark hair and a cowlick. I loosened my grip before the edge of the frame cut into my palm.

“Stella?”

My husband was at home, waiting to hear what I had found.

“He looks like Jake.”