What She Packed

I didn't get to see my dad's face when Detective Sorensen showed him the same folder, because they did that part without me, in a different room, for longer than felt normal. When he came out his eyes were red in a way I'd only seen once before, at my grandmother's funeral.

"She's going to deny it," he said in the car, mostly to himself. "She's going to have an explanation. She always has an explanation."

"Dad."

"I know." He gripped the wheel like it owed him something. "I know, Wynn."

Detective Sorensen had told us not to go home first, to wait at the station for a car to meet us there, standard procedure, she'd said, when there's a minor in the home and an active investigation. But my dad didn't wait. My dad has never in his life been good at waiting, which I used to think was a good quality in him.

We got to the house nine minutes before the patrol car did.

The garage door was up. Corinne's SUV was still there, but the back hatch was open, and two suitcases sat on the driveway like she'd been interrupted mid-decision — one packed full and zipped, one gaping open with clothes hanging out the side like something had startled her away from it.

Junie's car seat was already buckled into the back of the SUV.

My dad was out of our car before it had fully stopped rolling. "Corinne!"

The front door of the house stood open. Inside, I could hear Junie crying — not the quiet, practiced silence from the kitchen that first night, but loud, furious, unmistakable toddler screaming, the kind that meant someone had picked her up too fast, too hard, without asking.

"Corinne!" my dad shouted again, already running for the door.

I froze on the driveway between the open suitcase and my father's shrinking back, staring at the second bag — the one still gaping open — because sticking half out of a balled-up sweater was a familiar manila envelope, and clipped to the front of it, a driver's license with a third face on it. A third name.

Not Deborah. Not Corinne.

Someone else entirely.