Chapter 1
“You said you needed answers.”
“I do.”
“That sounds like something people say when they're avoiding giving any.”
One of the men at the table shifted slightly, but Damien lifted a hand without looking at him.
The man became still.
Damien kept his attention on me.
“You have every reason to be angry.”
“I don't need permission.”
“No.”
His voice was quieter now.
“You don't.”
That surprised me.
I had expected someone like Damien Moretti to answer anger with authority.
Instead, he looked tired.
Not physically tired.
Older than that.
The kind of tired that came from carrying the same question for years.
I pointed toward the phone.
“Where did you get this?”
“My sister found it.”
“Your sister?”
“Lucia.”
“Where?”
“In an old storage box that belonged to our father.”
I stared at him.
“And your father had a photograph of my mother?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
His answer came too quickly.
I shook my head.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to believe only what I can prove.”
“Then prove something.”
Damien sat back.
His gray eyes settled briefly on the photograph.
“Your mother worked for my family.”
That was not what I had expected.
“When?”
“Twenty-seven years ago.”
“What kind of work?”
“She was a bookkeeper.”
I almost laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was impossible.
“My mother hates numbers.”
A faint expression crossed Damien's face.
Almost a memory.
“She hated bookkeeping too.”
I stopped.
Something about the way he said it made my irritation disappear for half a second.
He knew that.
Not from a report.
Not from a background check.
He remembered it.
“What else?” I asked.
“She wanted to study architecture.”
My breathing changed.
Mom had never become an architect.
She had spent most of my childhood working administrative jobs, then later handled scheduling for a dental office before illness forced her to stop.
But when I was ten, I had found a sketchbook hidden in the back of her closet.
Buildings.
Bridges.
Courtyards.
Detailed drawings in pencil.
When I'd asked about them, she'd closed the book and said she'd once thought about going back to school.
That was all.
“How do you know that?”
“Because she used to draw on anything she could find.”
His voice softened.
“Receipts. Napkins. The backs of invoices. My father complained she wasted office paper.”
A memory surfaced.
Mom drawing houses on grocery lists while speaking on the phone.
I looked at Damien differently.
Still suspicious.
But differently.
“How well did you know her?”
The question seemed to find something painful.
“Very well.”
“Were you together?”
Damien didn't answer immediately.
That answer frightened me more than yes would have.
Finally, he said, “For a time.”
My stomach dropped.
I looked back at the baby in the photograph.
Then at him.
Silver hair.
Gray eyes.
A strong jaw.
I suddenly became aware of my own reflection faintly visible in the glass.
My dark hair was nothing like his.
My eyes were brown.
Mom's eyes.
I hated myself for noticing.
“Are you saying you're my father?”
“No.”
The word was immediate.
Certain.
Relief arrived so fast I almost felt dizzy.
Then Damien added, “At least, I don't believe I am.”
The relief vanished.
“You don't believe?”
“There are dates that don't fit.”
“What dates?”
“Your birthday.”
I stiffened.
“March nineteenth.”
“I know.”
Of course he did.
He seemed to know everything.
Damien folded his hands on the table.
“The last time I saw your mother before she disappeared from my life was almost eleven months before you were born.”
I did the calculation automatically.
“So you're not my father.”
“Biologically, that would appear impossible.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
“Because two weeks before your birth, your mother contacted me.”
I stared at him.
“What did she say?”
“That she needed help.”
“With what?”
“She wouldn't explain.”
“You didn't ask?”
“I asked repeatedly.”
“And?”
“She told me not to call her again.”
My frustration sharpened.
“That doesn't make sense.”
“No.”
“And then?”
“She vanished.”
“She didn't vanish. She raised me.”
“From me, she vanished.”
The distinction landed heavily.
Damien picked up the phone and swiped to another image.
A letter appeared.
The paper was yellowed.
The handwriting was unmistakably my mother's.
He handed the phone to me.
I read slowly.
Damien,
I know I have no right to ask you for anything after the way I left.
But something happened.
I need you to do one thing for me.
If anyone ever comes asking about the child, you have never seen her.
You don't know where I am.
You don't know my daughter.
Please trust me.
I wish I could explain.
Isabella.
The room seemed to tilt.
I read it again.
Then again.
“My daughter.”
Damien nodded.
“She never wrote your name.”
“When was this sent?”
“February twenty-third.”
Less than a month before I was born.
I gave him the phone.
“Maybe she was afraid of someone.”
“That was my assumption.”
“Who?”
“I spent years trying to find out.”
“Years?”
“For almost six years.”
“What happened after that?”
“I found your mother once.”
My heart stopped.
“When?”
“You were five.”
A childhood image flashed through my mind.
A narrow apartment.
A lemon-yellow kitchen.
Mom crying after someone knocked at the door late one evening.
She'd told me it was a salesman.
We moved three weeks later.
“Where?”
“Sacramento.”
I looked at him sharply.
We had lived there.
Only briefly.
“What happened?”
“She asked me to leave.”
“You just left?”
“I didn't want to.”
His expression hardened slightly, though not at me.
“She told me that contacting her again could put you in danger.”
The words should have sounded dramatic.
Instead, the way he said them made them feel strangely ordinary.
Like something he had replayed too many times.
“What danger?”
“She wouldn't tell me.”
“And you believed her?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Damien looked at me for a long moment.
“Because your mother was terrified.”
I had seen Mom frightened.
Before surgeries.
During bills.
Once when I nearly wandered into traffic at age six.
But terrified?
No.
Mom had always been the person who made fear smaller.
Even during her worst hospital nights, she worried about whether I had eaten.
“What does any of this have to do with you finding me now?”
Damien glanced toward the man seated beside him.
The man placed a thin envelope on the table.
“Three weeks ago,” Damien said, “my sister began clearing our father's personal archive.”
“Your father is dead?”
“For twelve years.”
“She found the photograph.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And something else.”
I opened the envelope.
Inside was a photocopy of a document.
At first I didn't understand what I was seeing.
Then I read the heading.
Birth registration amendment.
My hands went cold.
The child's name was listed as Ava Isabella Bennett.
Mother: Isabella Marie Bennett.
Father:
Blank.
But beneath that was a handwritten notation.
Original record sealed by court instruction.
“What is this?”
“A copy of an internal registry record.”
“How did you get it?”
Damien's eyes met mine.
“I asked someone to locate it.”
I almost argued about that.
Then the meaning of the page overtook everything else.
“Original record?”
“Yes.”
“My birth certificate doesn't say anything about an original record.”
“It wouldn't.”
“Why would my birth record be sealed?”
“I don't know.”
My patience broke.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I won't invent answers simply because you want them.”
“I want one answer.”
“So do I.”
The force behind his words finally surfaced.
Not anger.
Something closer to desperation.
For the first time, I understood something I hadn't considered.
Damien Moretti had not brought me here because he knew the truth.
He had brought me here because he was missing it too.
I lowered the document.
“What do you think happened?”
He looked toward the photograph.
“I think your mother was protecting you.”
“From whom?”
“I don't know.”
“Do you think my father was dangerous?”
“I considered it.”
“And?”
“There are other possibilities.”
“Such as?”
“Your mother could have been protecting someone else.”
I frowned.
“Who?”
“That is what I hoped you might help me determine.”
I pushed the envelope back toward him.
“I don't know anything.”
“You may know more than you realize.”
His words stayed with me.
I thought of Mom's apartment.
Her drawers.
Her habit of never keeping photographs.
There had always been surprisingly few pictures of my infancy.
I'd assumed we were poor and cameras were expensive.
Now the absence felt different.
“Does my mother know you're talking to me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I haven't spoken to her.”
“You know she's sick.”
“Yes.”
I looked toward the men at the table.
“You know about the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“My bills.”
“Yes.”
“My jobs.”
“Yes.”
“And you don't think this is invasive?”
“I do.”
The answer caught me off guard.
“Then why do it?”
“Because last week somebody else began asking questions about you.”
The room changed.
May you like
Not dramatically.
Nothing moved.
