She left the study and hustled to the bedroom, dismayed to find Bear lying on the floor, chewing a roll of toilet paper into bite-size bits. “That’s helpful, Lassie,” Bennie said, and yanked the soggy roll from the dog’s mouth. She bent over and picked up the clumps of toilet paper, which was when she spotted something in the shadows under the bed. A large plastic bin.

Bennie set the toilet paper down and peeked underneath. Bear peeked, too, his hindquarters in the air and tail awag. She muscled the dog out of the way, reached under the bed, and pulled out a storage bin. It was about three feet square, with a blue plastic top that said RUBBER-MAID. She pulled off the lid. Inside was a stack of small, homemade books, lying side by side, six across and several books deep. Bennie picked up the top book and saw that its pages were black, like the paper from the drawer in the study. From the back of the photos.

She stared at the closed book in her hands. It was only ten pages thick and its cover was of thin cardboard, punched through with a three-hole puncher and fashioned together with common twine. Did she have the right to look inside it? Did she want to? Bennie opened the first page. It was a black-and-white photo of a little boy on a pinto pony that stood incongruously on a suburban street. The boy was outfitted in a neckerchief and cowboy hat. Winslow? Bennie wanted to see the back of the photo, but it was glued in the book. If she pulled it off, he’d know someone had tampered with it. She flipped the page. The next photo took her breath away.

A snapshot of Winslow with her mother. There was no mistaking it. He had the same masculine grin and wore a T-shirt like the one in the photo Connolly had given her. In fact, the picture looked like it might have been the next shot on the roll, and Bennie wondered who had taken it. She looked at the photo again, breathing it in. Her mother looked young and had curled her arm through Winslow’s. Her lipsticked mouth smiled gaily and her eyes shone with happiness.

Her mother? Her father? Bennie tried to dislodge the photo but didn’t force it. What year was it taken? And what about Connolly?

Bennie turned the page. It was blank, with the top layer of paper torn away where a photo had been ripped out. She ran a finger over the ragged patch. The threads of paper matched the tufts on the back of the photo Connolly had given her. Had it been taken from this book? Bennie turned the next page. Another wartime photo. Airmen in groups. She found Winslow quickly in the photo, but it didn’t answer any questions about Connolly. She flipped another page. A bomber with a pinup painted on its riveted nose. Winslow and two other pilots posed in front of it. Were there photos of Connolly and Bennie, together?

The last page of the album was blank, its picture torn out, too. Was this the page that held the photo of Winslow with the two babies? Bennie scratched at the heavyweight paper and its fibers came off under her nail. She squinted at the tangled threads, and Bear leaned over to sniff. She closed the book and reached for the next. Not a homemade photo album, a homemade scrapbook of newspaper articles.

The clippings.

Bennie read the first page, a newspaper listing of law students who had passed the bar. She found her name easily, even in the tiny letters, because it was circled in pencil. Her heart thudded hard within her chest. Winslow had cut out the article and pasted it here, decades ago. She turned the page. A clipping from the Inquirer five years later, a brief mention that Bennie had successfully defended one Guillermo Diaz on a murder case. Again her name had been circled in pencil. The page after that was a report of another murder case she had defended, with her quote, “This is a case only a fool would bring. Need I say more?”

Bennie winced, but she didn’t know if it was the cockiness of the quote or the fact that it was circled in the same careful hand. The rest of the book was full of clippings, as was the book after that and the one after that. The homemade scrapbooks-fifteen in all-constituted a chronological account of her career and life. The revelation left her shaking. Winslow had to be her father, and at some level, he had to care. About her.

Right?

Bennie stared at the scrapbook, her emotions turbulent: a combustible brew of anger, exhilaration, and confusion. That the feelings couldn’t be parsed didn’t gainsay their potency. She had always known Winslow’s name, now she knew his face, and his way of life. He lived simply. He loved books and tended perennials. As a young man he served on a bomber and loved her mother. For one night.

Then Bennie reprimanded herself. Think like a lawyer, not a daughter. The scrapbooks proved only that Winslow knew her mother and that he had kept track of Bennie. It was slender evidence on which to assume that Winslow was her father or that he loved her. And the clippings contained nothing of Connolly, neither proving or disproving their relationship.

Right.

Bennie closed the book and placed it on the top of the stack. She sat motionless for a minute, then replaced the books in the plastic bin in the order in which she had taken them out. The last one to return was the one with the missing photographs. She ran her fingerpads over its dark, pebbled cover. It was all she had of a secret history and she wanted to hold it in her hands another second. Her fingers encircled the back of the book, where she felt something cool, papery, unpebbled.

She turned the book over. There was a small pink envelope taped to its back. Bennie hadn’t seen it the first time around. She turned the book sideways so she could read the envelope. The ballpoint ink was faint and clotted in spots. “To Bill,” it said, in a woman’s hand. Her mother’s hand. There could be no mistaking it. Bennie had seen her mother’s writing a thousand times, on powers of attorney, medical releases, and informed consent forms. What Bennie held in her hands now was a letter from her mother to her father. Maybe.

Bennie felt her throat thicken. She hadn’t heard them utter a word to each other, but she could read their most intimate thoughts. She freed the envelope from the scrap-book.

“Five minutes to lights out!” shouted the guard, and inmates began shuffling to their cells for the night.

Alice was already washing up in her cell. She dried her face and spotted Shetrell’s girl, Leonia, glancing at her as she lumbered by. Weird. Leonia’s cell was on the lower tier of the unit, underneath the ground floor. What was she doing on the upper deck so close to lights out? Goin’ up to Shetrell’s for a quickie? Disgusting. Alice didn’t get it. She liked her men with dicks. Anthony had been the exception, and Alice used to call him the only dick without a dick. She wasn’t sorry he was gone. She was only sorry she’d ended up in jail for it.

Alice stepped close to her cell door and watched Leonia amble down the hall. The big girl’s arms hung apart from her sides, the steroid shuffle. Alice flicked out the light and edged away from the door, watching. Leonia looked back over her shoulder in the direction of Alice’s cell.

Alice stood motionless in the darkness at her door.

Leonia turned back and walked past Shetrell’s cell without going in, then continued down the hall and took the stairs down to her tier, where Alice lost sight of her.

“What’re you doin’?” Alice’s cellie whined from her bunk. “I was readin’.”

“Shut up,” Alice said. Wondering.