Page 7 of Cross My Heart

“Peterson?” he asks, holding out another piece of mail to me. I nod, and then he pauses, studying me for a moment before snapping his fingers. “Peterson, the American. Name like a bird…”

I blink, surprised. “Wren?” I ask.

“That’s it,” he smiles. “I never forget a face. Relation of yours?”

“My sister,” I reply slowly, my mind racing. Peterson is a common enough name that I didn’t think about changing it on my applications. “You knew her?”

Bates nods. “Nice girl, always up early to go get that coffee of hers,” he adds, and I trail him back out to the main reception area, which is busy with students coming and going. “How’s she getting along, these days?”

“Great,” I lie brightly, feeling an ache in my chest. “She’s back home in the States, deep in some big research project.”

“Good for her,” Bates says. “Tell her this old man says ‘Hello,’ and to watch her blood pressure with all that espresso," he adds.

“I will.” I pause, as people bustle around us. “You know, you’re the first person I’ve run into that knew Wren when she was here,” I say, trying my hardest to keep my voice casual. “You don’t remember any of her old friends, do you? I’d love to get some embarrassing stories about her, to make her suffer at the holidays.”

He chuckles. “Sorry, I can’t recall. Maybe check the yearbooks,” he suggests.

Yearbooks! Of course. I brighten. “Where could I find them?”

“Try the library,” he says. I’m still blank, so he adds, “Across the main quad, take a right, then a left. You’ll be spending plenty of time there, mark my words.”

“Thanks.”

My gratitude is drowned out by another student asking about a food delivery, so I slip away, following his directions across the campus to the library, which is just as imposing and beautiful as every other building in the college, with ivy-covered walls, stained glass in the windows and a huge vaulted roof with a bell tower nestled on top.

I only arrived on campus a couple of days ago, but I feel like I know it already—thanks to Wren. She loved this place. From the day she stepped foot in Oxford, she couldn’t stop texting about the ancient architecture, sending me constant updates about the cute period details and artwork scattered around campus. Now, I feel a pang, thinking of how happy she could have still been here, if things had turned out differently.

If she hadn’t gone to that party. If she’d stayed up studying, or chosen to hang with her friends and watch a movie in the common room instead.

If some monster hadn’t done unspeakable things, and broken her good, pure spirit forever.

I swallow back my familiar rage, and step inside the dim, hushed building. The librarian directs me to the stacks along the back wall, where I find a dusty row of yearbooks, stretching back forty years and more. I grab the volume from two years ago and settle in at a desk in the corner to search. Leafing through the pages of student pics, I feel a jolt when I first come across a photo of Wren, gathered in the back of a group of beaming students, out on the front quad. She looks so happy that I spend a long moment just staring at her smiling face, remembering the sister I used to know.

The sister I lost.

When I read the caption at the bottom of the picture, I realize it’s from a welcome mixer at the beginning of that fateful school year. I absorb the photo, trying to memorize every face in the frame, desperate for even the smallest breadcrumbs. I want to know who she was talking to, who she hung out with—who might know anything about what happened to her.

I go back to flipping through the pictures, searching carefully in every shot for more glimpses of her. There are a few: a group picnic on the quad, a formal dinner in the grand hall. There she is, in the back of a shot of some other students: sitting in the shadow of one of the old elm trees, head bent studiously under a book.

The ache in my chest grows. God, I miss her so much.

But I force myself to keep searching, jotting down the other names listed in every photo she’s in. There are a couple of other students that keep popping up in the same shots with her; a short redhead with dimples standing arm-in-arm with Wren in one pic, and raising a toast at a group dinner in another.Lara Southerly. I make a note of her name. There’s a tall, tow-haired boy, too, caught smiling at Wren with a look of adoration clear in his eyes.Phillip McAllister.

Maybe I’m clutching at straws here, imagining they might remember more than Wren even did herself, but I’m going to follow every clue I can find. Somehow, I’ll piece it together, what happened to her. Then, maybe I’ll find the answers—and some peace.

I’m at the end of the yearbook when I find it: Wren, dressed up in a floaty pink cocktail dress, caught in a blur of motion, spinning around. Her face is hidden from the camera behind a waterfall of dark hair, and there’s no name in the caption, but I’d know her anywhere.

I remember that dress. We picked it out together at an expensive boutique, when she was preparing for her trip. Wren balked at the price, but I convinced her. After all, I teased, who knew what fancy parties she’d be invited to, rubbing elbows with the cream of the English aristocracy in Oxford?

Sure enough, in the photo, she’s in the lavish gardens of some sweeping country house. It looks like she’s having the time of her life.

She didn’t know that it would soon be over.

I stare at the photo and feel a deep shiver. A grand house in the countryside… A formal event…

Was this the night she was taken?

My heart is in my throat as I scan the page for information. Wren couldn’t remember anything useful about this mysterious party, no matter how hard she tried. Where it was, who was there, how she even wound up attending at all… She wondered if she’d been dreaming about the glimpses of ballgowns and champagne glasses, but this picture in the yearbook matches up with those shattered fragments of memory.

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