Daughter of Mine

by Megan Miranda

In the West, there were the bodies. But here, we were less flashy, less prone to drama and sensation. We preferred our crimes quiet, our cases closed—that was my father’s motto. He was the last of a dying breed, I thought. A detective who got no shot of adrenaline from either the chase or the justice. So very different from the craving of my youth: Give me a wrong, so that I may punish.

Detective Perry Holt—while

Narrator's father

Caden

Narrator's brother

Gage,

Narrator's other brother

Hazel

Main character and narrator

Jamie.

Sister in law? married to Caden?

“Is Skyler around?” My six-year-old niece was always a welcome distraction.

Stay too long, and you became exactly what Mirror Lake decided you would be.

Nico Pritchard,

Nicholas. Who is he?

It was a feat, considering he was Gage’s oldest friend, and he still owned the house on the same inlet as my dad, bordering our property.

Nico

I thought it was probably Keira or Luke—my business partners and closest friends—checking in, updating me on the day’s progress.

ROY HOLT

Hazel's uncle

The house is yours. Just yours.

Uh oh

Every house has a story, and every renovation, a mystery—something the prior owners are trying to fix, or cover up.

It was our first secret.

Was it just old cases or did Nico's father hide something more sinister

My father used to say you have to keep an eye on things, or they’d change on you.

“My dad says you’re not really my aunt,” she said, watching me intently.

“Why not?” Roy said. “You always were his favorite.”

The man who owned this house was not really my father.

My mother had grifted her way into the Holts’ lives when Caden and I were both almost eight, and Gage was ten. A little more than six years later, she’d grifted her way out, but left me behind. I was fourteen. In place of everything she’d taken, all she’d left me was a letter she’d slipped under the pillow of my bed, inside a single envelope addressed to Daughter of Mine.

Serena Flores,

Old friend of the Holts, part of the department

The bartender, Felicity,

Audrey.

Perry Holt's first wife, G and C's mother

Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.

Libby Sharp

Hazel's mother

I can’t get the pictures out of my head, he’d said. And then, solemnly, He killed himself, you know.

Nico's father

The last words she ever gave me. The brutal finality: I hope one day you can forgive me.

Alberto Flores.

Serena's father and a detective

Two hardback cases. Royal blue.

Uh oh

Sonny

Jamie's Mother

Pete Henderson,

Another detective who worked with Hazel's dad?

“Joe Lyons,”

Another man that Hazel's mom knew. Before Holt

How much deeper did my mother’s secrets go?

The only thing I ever found—or thought I’d found—was a postcard that once arrived for me in my college mailbox, my name and address printed on a label. A picture of a beach at sunset, a single palm tree, from a town on the coast of Mexico.

Keira and Luke had probably arrived together. They were now officially a couple, after years of dancing around it—but it also changed the way we operated as a business together.

I’ve since decided this shared confidence was the most essential quality in business: the confidence to try; the confidence that you had something to offer, that you had a vision worth seeing through. The more you believed, the more you could convince others to believe too.

Layne.

Skyler's babysitter

He seemed to prefer the lake as his domain—issuing citations to intoxicated boaters, answering calls for assistance—and then leaving work behind at the end of his shift.

Hmmm Caden seems shady af

A message. A promise. A warning: Come back, Hazel. Look. Find them.

“It’s a pattern, don’t you think?” she asked. A pattern with the cars. A pattern of behavior. “Wives, leaving the Holt men?” she continued. “Your mother, Audrey. God, I don’t even remember the name of Roy’s wife, that marriage was so quick.”

“But if you don’t believe me, ask your uncle.” She winked.

Audrey was going to leave Holt

She sniffed. “I warned her, you know. Being a Holt isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But I guess I don’t need to tell you that.”

Felicity

Bartender at Reflection Point

“I mean, it seems to me that not everyone makes it out of Mirror Lake so easily.”

Someone was out there.

Nico?

capitulated

Surrender

“The truth is,” I said, “most of the issues you can see, those are just surface problems. Easy, honestly. If you can see it, you can fix it. It’s the things you don’t see that can really hurt you.”

We loved the idea of the unknown, more than the known.

Hazel and Nico

The thing about a first love was that you told them everything. All the secrets, all the parts that made you into who you had become. Before you boxed them up, stacked them away. But they still had them: all the pieces that you eventually learned not to share with others, from experience.

Levi

The kidc that works at the country store