The first man stepped into the break room and looked directly at me.
“Miss Marshall?”
He was older than the other guard, with silver at his temples and a thin scar running through his left eyebrow. Rain glistened on the shoulders of his coat. He kept his hands where I could see them.
Somehow, that frightened me more.
“Yes,” I said.
“My name is Luca Bellini. Mr. Moretti sent us.”
“I gathered that.”
Marco made a small, strangled sound beside me.
Luca glanced at him, then back at me.
“Would you come with us?”
“Would you leave if I said no?”
The younger guard looked toward Luca.
That brief movement told me everything.
I tightened my grip on the strap of my tote bag.
“Your employer just threatened to destroy my neighborhood. He has people pulling my employment records. Now you’re standing in my workplace asking politely whether I’d like a ride.”
Luca’s expression changed slightly.
“What threat?”
I looked at Marco.
My manager suddenly became interested in the clipboard pressed against his chest.
“Tell him,” I said.
“Olivia, please—”
“Tell him what the man on the phone said.”
Luca turned toward Marco.
“Who called you?”
Marco’s mouth opened. Closed.
“Someone from the estate.”
“A name.”
“He didn’t give one.”
“Then how did you know he was from the estate?”
“He knew about the dog.”
The rain tapped against the open loading door.
Luca held out his hand.
“Your phone.”
Marco hesitated for half a second before surrendering it.
Luca studied the call history. Whatever he saw made his jaw tighten.
He took out his own phone and stepped into the hallway.
I could hear only fragments.
“Different number.”
A pause.
“No. Before we arrived.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“She was told we would force her.”
When he returned, he handed Marco’s phone back.
“That call did not come from us.”
I let out a sharp laugh.
“Convenient.”
“You’re right to be suspicious.”
I had expected irritation. The agreement unsettled me.
Luca reached into his coat slowly, withdrew his phone, and placed it on the break-room table.
“Mr. Moretti would like to speak to you.”
“I’m sure he would.”
“He’s on speaker.”
For a moment, all I heard was breathing.
Then the voice from table twelve filled the little room.
“Miss Marshall.”
My stomach tightened.
“Did you threaten my manager?”
“No.”
“Did you investigate me?”
“Yes.”
The answer came without hesitation.
I stared at the phone.
“Then you understand why I don’t believe you about the first part.”
“I understand.”
“What do you want?”
“To show you something.”
“You could send a photograph.”
“Some things you should see in person.”
“That sounds exactly like what a man says before someone disappears.”
Silence.
Marco looked as though he might faint.
Then Dante spoke again.
“Luca will give you the address. Send it to someone you trust. Keep your phone. Share your location. If you come here and wish to leave, he will drive you home.”
“And if I don’t come?”
A pause.
“Then I will have to find another way to ask you about your childhood.”
The break room seemed to contract.
“My childhood?”
“Before your adoption.”
I hadn’t told anyone at Aurelia that I was adopted.
Not Marco. Not the women I split late-night cab fares with. Not even the cook who saved me soup when I couldn’t afford dinner.
My adoptive mother had died three years earlier. Since then, the few facts I possessed about my early life had lived in a dented biscuit tin beneath my bed.
A placement letter.
An amended birth certificate.
A hospital discharge form with a date nobody could explain.
“How do you know about that?” I asked.
“I have a document bearing your name.”
“Lots of people have my name.”
“This document also lists a childhood injury.”
My fingers went cold.
“What injury?”
Dante didn’t answer immediately.
“Is there someone in the room you would prefer not to hear this?”
I looked at Marco.
He was staring at me now.
I picked up the phone and took it off speaker.
“What injury?”
“A burn on the inside of your left wrist.”
I pressed my arm against my body.
Beneath the cuff of my uniform was a small pale scar, shaped vaguely like a crescent.
My mother had told me I’d touched a radiator in a temporary foster home.
I had no memory of doing it.
“Who gave you that?”
“Come here,” Dante said quietly. “And I’ll show you.”
I should have hung up.
Instead, I heard myself ask, “What does this have to do with your dog?”
For the first time, his voice lost its certainty.
“I don’t know.”
I called my neighbor before I got into the car.
Mrs. Alvarez answered on the fifth ring, breathless and annoyed.
“If this is about your sink again, I told the landlord—”
“It’s not the sink.”
Something in my voice made her stop.
I told her where I was going. I sent the address Luca had given me and turned on my location sharing.
She repeated the address back to me.
“Who lives there?”
“A customer from the restaurant.”
“Olivia.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I looked through the loading door at the black SUV.
Luca stood beside it, waiting. The younger guard had moved several feet away and was speaking into his sleeve.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” I said.
“And when you leave.”
“Yes.”
“If your phone goes off, I’m calling everybody.”
Despite myself, I smiled.
“Who’s everybody?”
“Don’t test me.”
I ended the call, took a photograph of the license plate, and sent that too.
Luca watched without comment.
Before getting in, I turned to him.
“My manager said something about genetic markers.”
His gaze sharpened.
“What exactly did he say?”
“That your boss had run some kind of biometric check. That he’d found something impossible.”
“No one obtained your genetic information last night.”
“So that was a lie too?”
“It sounds like one.”
“But you did find adoption records.”
“A reference to a placement,” he said carefully. “Not your entire file.”
I thought of the anonymous caller.
He had known enough truth to make the lie convincing.
For the first time, I wondered whether the men beside the SUV were the only people watching the restaurant.
For the first twenty minutes, I sat with my hand around the door handle.
Luca noticed.
“It isn’t locked.”
I tested it when we stopped at a red light.
He said nothing.
That small courtesy made it harder to dismiss everything he told me, which irritated me more than outright hostility would have.
Manhattan slipped behind us. Towers gave way to warehouses, then stretches of wet road and trees shedding the last of their leaves.
My phone vibrated.
Mrs. Alvarez.
Still alive?
I typed back.
Yes. Still in car.
Three dots appeared.
Eat something. You make bad decisions hungry.
I looked at the granola bar crushed at the bottom of my bag.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, that nearly made me cry.
I unwrapped it.
Across from me, Luca looked out the window.
“How old is Orion?” I asked.
“Eight.”
I stopped chewing.
“Eight?”
“Yes.”
Whatever explanation I had half-built in my mind fell apart.
I had been imagining a forgotten dog from childhood. A creature that remembered me when I couldn’t remember myself.
But eight years ago, I had been eighteen.
Working in a grocery store in Queens.
Taking evening classes.
Helping my mother manage the illness that would eventually kill her.
“I’ve never met him,” I said.
Luca turned back.
“Are you certain?”
“I think I’d remember a dog the size of a small horse.”
“Mr. Moretti understands that.”
“Then why does everyone keep acting as though he recognized me?”
Luca folded his hands.
“Because he behaved as though he did.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
I watched the road.
“Who trained him?”
A small hesitation.
“A woman Mr. Moretti employed.”
“Can you ask her?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“She died.”
The granola bar turned dry in my mouth.
“When?”
“Last winter.”
I waited for more.
He didn’t offer it.
The estate stood behind iron gates at the end of a winding road.
It wasn’t a palace. Somehow, that made it worse.
A broad stone house sat beyond a gravel courtyard, its windows glowing through the rain. Old trees crowded the lawns. There were no fountains, no gold statues, nothing intended to impress a visitor.
There were cameras.
I counted six before we reached the front steps.
Then something black moved beside the entrance.
Orion.
He rose so abruptly that the woman standing near him caught at his collar and missed.
He came down the steps at a run.
I heard Luca say my name, but I was already out of the car.
“Hey, sweetheart.”
The dog stopped inches from me.
For one terrible second, I understood exactly how powerful he was. His head was wider than my hand span. His shoulders came almost to my hip.
Then he pushed his nose into my palm.
His whole body shuddered.
“Oh,” I whispered.
I sank onto the wet gravel.
Orion pressed against me, making a low sound that seemed too deep to come from any ordinary animal. His tail struck my coat. He sniffed my hair, my sleeves, the hollow beneath my chin.
I laughed once, breathlessly, because otherwise I might have panicked.
“Okay. Okay, I’m here.”
At the top of the steps, Dante Moretti stood without a coat.
He looked as though he hadn’t slept.
In the restaurant, the expensive clothes and the watch and the room’s fear had made him seem almost unreal.
Here, in a dark sweater with rain gathering in his hair, he looked like a man waiting for bad news he had been expecting for years.
The woman beside him covered her mouth.
Dante didn’t move.
Orion leaned harder against me.
“Could someone help?” I asked. “I’m going to fall over.”
Luca took my elbow.
The ordinary awkwardness broke whatever spell had settled over the courtyard.
Dante came down the steps.
“Thank you for coming.”
“I haven’t decided whether that was a mistake.”
“I know.”
I stood, brushing gravel from my knees.
Orion stayed pressed to my leg.
“Before we do anything else,” I said, “feed your dog.”
They brought his bowl into a room overlooking the garden.
A woman named Rosa placed it on a mat near my chair. Orion sniffed the food, looked at me, and waited.
I looked at Dante.
“What does he usually eat?”
“That.”
“Then why is everyone staring?”
Rosa let out a startled breath.
Luca looked away.
Dante drew a chair back from the table.
“Because this is the first time he’s approached his bowl since yesterday.”
I picked up a piece of the food and offered it on my palm.
Orion took it gently.
Then he lowered his head and began to eat.
Rosa turned toward the window.
I could see her reflection wiping at her eyes.
I looked at Dante.
“Has a vet seen him?”
“This morning.”
“And?”
“Physically, he’s well.”
“Then perhaps he’s grieving.”
Dante’s eyes shifted to Rosa.
The movement was small, but I saw it.
“The woman who trained him,” I said. “Luca told me she died.”
Rosa left the room carrying an empty tray.
Dante waited until the door closed.
“Her name was Elena.”
“Was she his owner?”
“She lived here.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No.”
He sat across from me.
Orion ate noisily between us.
“Who was she to you?”
“My sister.”
I looked down at the dog.
“I’m sorry.”
Dante nodded once.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then I said, “I don’t look like you.”
“No.”
“Do I look like her?”
“Enough that I noticed.”
The room seemed suddenly too warm.
“People resemble other people.”
“Yes.”
“And dogs get confused.”
“Yes.”
“Then why am I here?”
Dante placed a photograph on the table.
At first, I saw only the dog.
A younger Orion stood in a garden, his oversized paws planted against a woman’s knees.
She was laughing.
Dark hair had escaped from a loose knot at the back of her head. There was dirt on the hem of her jeans and a gardening glove tucked into her pocket.
Her face wasn’t mine.
But I understood why he had looked at me.
The same shape of cheekbone.
The same slight unevenness in the eyebrows.
The same deep crease beside the mouth when she smiled.
I picked up the photograph.
“She could be a relative.”
“She could.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I think resemblance is a reason to ask questions. It isn’t an answer.”
I looked up.
It was the first sensible thing anyone had said since Marco dragged me into the break room.
“How old was she?”
“Forty-four.”
The photograph trembled slightly in my hand.
Old enough.
I hated myself for calculating it.
Dante saw.
He reached for another envelope but didn’t open it.
“Tell me what you know about your adoption.”
“My mother’s name was Margaret Marshall.”
“The woman who adopted you?”
“My mother,” I repeated.
He lowered his gaze.
“Your mother.”
“She worked in a school office. She liked terrible detective shows and watered every plant she owned to death. She took me home when I was six. Whatever you’re about to tell me doesn’t change any of that.”
“I didn’t ask you here to take her from you.”
“People do that without meaning to.”
Dante sat back.
“All right.”
I set the photograph down.
“I was placed with her shortly after my sixth birthday. Before that, there was a hospital and some kind of emergency placement. The records were incomplete.”
“What do you remember?”
“A room.”
“What kind of room?”
“White walls. A window I couldn’t reach.”
“A hospital?”
“Maybe.”
I rubbed my wrist beneath the table.
“And a song. Not the words. Just the tune.”
Dante became very still.
I noticed.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Look as though every ordinary thing I say means something.”
He exhaled slowly.
“You’re right.”
I glanced toward the garden.
“Sometimes I remember water. But my mother thought that came from nightmares.”
“Did she ever tell you where you were found?”
“Near a road. Upstate. A passing driver brought me to a hospital.”
“Which hospital?”
I told him.
He looked toward the closed door.
“Luca.”
The door opened almost immediately.
I turned in my chair.
“Was he listening?”
“Yes,” Dante said.
Anger warmed my face.
“Then bring him in. I’m not going to sit here being studied through a door.”
Luca entered.
Dante didn’t argue.
That mattered, though I didn’t want it to.
He opened the envelope.
Inside was a faded photocopy.
Across the top, in block capitals, were the words:
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE CHILD.
I didn’t touch it.
Dante slid it only halfway across the table, leaving the choice to me.
The report described a child found walking along a county road before dawn.
Approximate age: five to seven.
Bare feet.
Mild hypothermia.
A burn on the left wrist.
I read that line three times.
There were other details.
A cut beneath the chin.
A missing upper front tooth.
A blue cardigan with one white button replaced by a brown one.
My breathing changed.
“What?” Dante asked.
I shook my head.
“Olivia.”
“My mother kept it.”
“The cardigan?”
“In the tin with my papers.”
Luca pulled out the chair beside the door and sat.
The room was quiet except for Orion licking the bottom of his bowl.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“It was in Elena’s files.”
“Why?”
Dante looked at the report.
“Because she had been looking for that child.”
“For how long?”
“Twenty years.”
I pushed the paper away.
“No.”
Neither man spoke.
“You don’t get to put a photograph in front of me and tell me a dead woman was looking for me for twenty years.”
“I’m telling you what I found.”
“Then you found the wrong child.”
“The scar—”
“Could belong to someone else.”
“The hospital—”
“Could have treated hundreds of children.”
Dante stopped.
I stood so quickly my chair scraped across the floor.
Orion lifted his head.
“My mother tried,” I said.
The words came out louder than I intended.
“She wrote letters. She called agencies. She took time off work to sit in offices where nobody knew anything. So if somebody was looking, why didn’t they find us?”
Dante’s face had gone pale.
“I don’t know.”
“Then find out before you say things like that.”
My hands were shaking.
I hated that too.
Dante rose, then stopped when I stepped back.
“The car is available whenever you want it.”
I looked toward the door.
For a few seconds, leaving was all I wanted.
I wanted Mrs. Alvarez’s cramped kitchen.
I wanted my mother’s chipped blue mug.
I wanted the version of my life that had been sad and difficult but at least belonged to me.
Then I looked down at the report again.
The brown button.
My mother had kept that ridiculous cardigan for twenty years.
Not because it was pretty.
Because it was the only thing I had arrived with.
I slowly sat.
“One thing at a time,” I said.
Dante sat too.
“One thing at a time.”
Elena had not raised Orion from a puppy.
She had taken him in after a trainer declared him unsuitable for ordinary placement. He was frightened of enclosed spaces, suspicious of hands, and so reactive around unfamiliar people that the estate staff had learned to announce themselves before entering a room.
“She worked with him every day,” Dante said. “For years.”
“What happened when she died?”
“He waited outside her bedroom.”
“For how long?”
Dante looked at the dog.
“He still sleeps there sometimes.”
I rubbed Orion’s head.
That, at least, I understood.
My mother’s cardigan still hung behind my bedroom door.
Three years, and I hadn’t moved it.
“Did she have children?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The answer caught beneath my ribs.
“A daughter.”
I kept my eyes on the dog.
“What happened to her?”
“She disappeared.”
“When?”
“Twenty years ago.”
“How?”
Dante didn’t answer.
I looked at him.
“You brought me all this way.”
“I’m trying to decide how much I can tell you without giving you things you might later mistake for memories.”
That stopped me.
Outside, rain ran down the window in uneven lines.
Finally, I said, “Then tell me things a child wouldn’t know.”
He considered that.
“There was an accident involving a car. The driver died. The child wasn’t found at the scene.”
“Was Elena in the car?”
“No.”
“And you?”
“No.”
“Did the police search?”
“Yes.”
“Did they find anything?”
“A shoe. Some fabric. Enough to make people believe she had gone into the river.”
Water.
The word moved through me before I could stop it.
I pressed both feet against the floor.
Dante noticed but stayed silent.
“What was her name?” I asked.
He looked at me for a long time.
Then he said, “Sofia.”
Nothing happened.
No rush of recognition.
No lost door swinging open in my mind.
Just a name in a quiet room.
I didn’t know whether that disappointed or relieved me.
“I don’t remember that.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“Did Elena believe she was alive?”
“Until the day she died.”
Rosa brought tea I didn’t drink.
She set a plate of toast beside me, glanced at Dante, and said, “She should eat.”
“I had a granola bar.”
Rosa gave me a look remarkably similar to Mrs. Alvarez’s.
I took a piece of toast.
Dante watched her leave.
“Everyone bosses you around here,” I said.
“Only the people who have known me long enough.”
It was such a normal answer that, for a moment, I almost forgot where I was.
Then Luca’s phone vibrated.
He glanced at the screen and stood.
Dante looked up.
“Here.”
Luca hesitated.
“Say it,” I said.
He turned the screen toward us.
It showed the alley behind Aurelia.
The restaurant’s loading door stood open.
A man in a delivery jacket was visible near the bins, his face partly turned toward the camera.
“That’s the camera above the kitchen entrance,” Luca said.
I leaned forward.
“I’ve seen him.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. Maybe the day before.”
“Was he delivering anything?”
I searched my memory.
A gray cap.
A cardboard drink carrier.
Marco speaking to him near the staff lockers.
“I don’t know.”
Luca’s expression hardened.
“The number that called your manager belongs to a prepaid phone. It’s already inactive.”
I looked from him to Dante.
“You think that man called?”
“We’re checking,” Luca said.
Dante held out his hand.
“Show me the next image.”
Luca swiped.
The man was closer to the camera now.
In his hand was a phone.
He was looking at the loading door.
At me.
The timestamp was from that morning.
Seven minutes before Luca arrived.
My toast fell onto the plate.
Dante’s voice was very quiet.
“Who knew she was coming here?”
“Your office. Me. Adrian.”
The name changed the room.
Not dramatically.
No one jumped.
But Dante’s face closed, and Luca stopped moving.
“Who’s Adrian?” I asked.
“My cousin,” Dante said.
“Does he live here?”
“He manages some family matters.”
“What matters?”
Dante looked at the photograph of Elena.
“Among other things, he helped my sister with her search.”
I stared at him.
“You think someone in your family made that call?”
“I think someone wanted you frightened before we reached you.”
“Why?”
“We haven’t established that yet.”
I laughed, and it sounded awful.
“So I came here because someone frightened me into it.”
Dante didn’t answer.
“Did you know about the call before Luca told you?”
“No.”
“And did you really tell him he could leave if I refused?”
“Yes.”
I looked at Luca.
He nodded.
It wasn’t proof.
But it was something I could question later.
I took out my phone and called Mrs. Alvarez.
She answered immediately.
“I’m at the address,” I told her. “I’m okay.”
“Why do you sound like that?”
“Long morning.”
“Did you eat?”
“Yes.”
That was easier than anything else I could have said.
I asked to see Elena’s files.
Dante led me down a corridor lined with photographs.
Most were ordinary.
A younger Dante standing beside an older woman at a birthday table.
Elena in sunglasses on a boat.
Two children with missing teeth leaning into each other in front of a Christmas tree.
I slowed at that one.
Dante followed my gaze.
“My sister and me.”
“You look happy.”
“We were.”
The answer had no bitterness in it.
That made it sadder.
At the end of the corridor, he unlocked a study.
The room smelled faintly of paper and furniture polish. Books filled one wall. A green reading lamp stood on a desk beside a pair of glasses.
There were boxes beneath the window.
Not one or two.
Dozens.
Each had a year written on it.
I stood in the doorway.
“She kept everything?”
“Yes.”
“Did you help her?”
“At first.”
“And later?”
Dante looked at the boxes.
“Later, I paid people to keep looking.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No.”
He took a breath.
“After enough years, I thought the search was hurting her. I told her she needed to stop.”
I imagined saying that to a mother.
“Did she?”
“No.”
There was no defense in his voice.
I walked to the nearest box.
The year on it was the year Margaret Marshall had adopted me.
Dante crouched and lifted it onto the desk.
Inside were folders arranged by state.
Hospital correspondence.
Private investigators’ invoices.
Letters from social workers.
Photographs of children who might have been the missing girl.
I saw one with curly red hair and felt a strange ache.
How many faces had Elena studied?
How often had she thought this one?
At the bottom of the box was a folder with my hospital’s name.
I reached for it.
Dante stepped closer.
Inside lay the report I had already seen, along with a handwritten note.
Possible match. Follow up urgently.
Beneath it was a second page.
A typed summary.
The child had supposedly been identified and returned to biological relatives.
The case had been closed.
I read it once.
Then again.
“That’s wrong.”
Dante held out his hand.
I gave him the page.
“I wasn’t returned to anyone,” I said. “I went into foster care. Then my mother took me home.”
Luca moved into the doorway.
Dante read the summary without speaking.
At the bottom was a signature.
Adrian Moretti.
Nobody touched anything for several seconds.
Then Dante placed the paper flat on the desk.
“Luca.”
“I see it.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means this needs to be verified.”
“I know what verified means. Why did your cousin write that I went home to people who never existed?”
Dante’s jaw worked.
“I don’t know.”
I looked at the boxes again.
Twenty years.
A woman had spent twenty years searching through these folders while the answer might have been sitting in a false report.
“Did Elena see this?”
“Yes.”
“What did she do?”
“She kept looking elsewhere.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
For the first time since I arrived, the possibility became something larger than a photograph.
Someone could have missed me.
Someone could have spent years wondering whether I was cold or hungry or hurt.
Someone could have died without knowing I had been safe.
Not always happy.
Not always easy.
But loved.
My eyes filled before I could stop them.
“I had a good mother,” I said.
Dante’s face changed.
“I believe you.”
“She used to stay up with me when I had nightmares.”
He said nothing.
“She would sit on the floor beside my bed because I didn’t like people standing over me in the dark.”
I wiped my cheeks angrily.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you that.”
Dante looked down.
“Because someone should know.”
I asked to be alone.
Dante left the study door open.
Luca went with him.
Orion remained.
I sat on the edge of the chair beside Elena’s desk and looked at the photograph of her laughing in the garden.
I tried to imagine calling her Mother.
It felt disloyal.
It felt impossible.
Then I remembered Margaret once telling me that loving the people who had come before her would never hurt her feelings.
I had been nine.
There had been a school assignment about family trees.
I had cried because I didn’t know where mine started.
My mother had drawn a second trunk beside the first.
“Trees can grow together,” she’d said.
I had forgotten that until now.
Orion pressed his chin against my knee.
I buried my fingers in his fur.
“You don’t know either, do you?”
His tail moved once.
On the desk stood a small framed photograph facing the chair.
I turned it toward me.
A little girl sat on a kitchen counter beside Elena.
She wore a blue cardigan.
One of the buttons was brown.
I don’t remember standing.
One moment I was seated.
The next, I was in the doorway with the frame held so tightly that the metal edge cut into my palm.
“Dante.”
He came from the room across the corridor.
I held up the photograph.
“Where was this taken?”
He looked at it.
“Here. The old kitchen.”
“Do you still have it?”
“The kitchen?”
“Please.”
He led me downstairs without another question.
The kitchen had been renovated, but part of it remained: a broad stone fireplace, a low window overlooking a walled garden, dark wooden beams crossing the ceiling.
Rosa stood at the counter peeling an apple.
She looked up as we entered.
I stopped beneath the doorway.
For a second, the room shifted.
Not a clear memory.
Something smaller.
A feeling of sitting high above the floor.
Cold stone beneath my bare legs.
A spoon tapping against a bowl.
I looked toward the window.
“There was something blue.”
Dante didn’t speak.
I closed my eyes.
“No. Don’t tell me. Just—wait.”
The sensation slipped away when I tried to hold it.
I opened my eyes, frustrated.
“A bowl, maybe.”
Rosa set down the knife.
“We had blue bowls.”
“Lots of people have blue bowls.”
“Yes,” she said gently. “They do.”
I looked at her.
Her eyes were wet.
But she stayed where she was.
She didn’t come toward me.
She didn’t call me by a name I couldn’t remember.
I was grateful for that.
On the counter beside her lay a long curling strip of apple peel.
Without thinking, I said, “You made the little birds.”
Rosa went still.
Dante turned toward me.
I stared at the peel.
“I—”
Rosa picked up the knife with an unsteady hand.
Slowly, she cut two thin slices of apple.
She fitted them together with a small piece between them and turned the little shape toward me.
Wings.
A rounded body.
A tiny pointed head.
An apple bird.
The floor seemed to drop beneath my feet.
Dante reached for me, then stopped just short of touching my arm.
“Olivia?”
I couldn’t answer.
Because I could hear someone laughing.
A woman’s voice.
Close to my ear.
And my own small voice saying, Make him fly.
They gave me water.
I sat at the kitchen table until my hands stopped trembling.
No one called it proof.
I appreciated that more than I could say.
Finally, Dante sat opposite me.
“We can arrange an independent test,” he said. “A laboratory you choose. You don’t have to decide anything today.”
I looked at him.
“And if it says I’m not her?”
“Then we find out why your records were in my sister’s files, and why someone lied about them.”
“And if I am?”
His eyes moved briefly to the photograph beside my glass.
“Then I tell you everything I know.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Even the parts that make you look bad?”
His mouth tightened.
“Especially those.”
I wanted to believe him.
That was the frightening part.
Luca appeared at the kitchen door.
“Dante.”
Something in his voice made Rosa put her hand on my shoulder.
Dante rose.
“What?”
“Adrian’s here.”
I looked toward the corridor.
A man’s voice floated through the house.
Warm. Familiar to everyone but me.
“Where is he? I’ve been trying his phone.”
Footsteps crossed the entrance hall.
Dante moved toward the door.
“Stay here,” he told me.
I stood.
“No.”
He looked back.
“If he wrote that report, I want to see him.”
Luca stepped aside reluctantly.
The man who entered the corridor wore a camel-colored coat and carried a leather folder beneath one arm.
He was perhaps fifty, with neatly combed hair and the easy expression of someone accustomed to being welcomed.
“Dante, I heard about the girl at the restaurant. Before this becomes another one of Elena’s—”
He saw me.
His sentence stopped.
Not slowly.
It broke in half.
His eyes went to my face, then the photograph in my hand.
For an instant, there was no smile left anywhere on him.
Then he recovered.
“You must be Olivia.”
I didn’t answer.
A sound had begun behind my eyes.
Water striking metal.
A seat belt pulling tight.
Someone saying, Don’t move.
Adrian took a step toward me.
Dante moved between us.
“Stay there.”
Adrian looked at him.
“What is this?”
Dante held up the report.
“Explain it.”
Adrian barely glanced at the paper.
“That was years ago.”
“Explain it.”
“The investigator confirmed the child had been identified.”
“Which investigator?”
“I would have to check.”
“Then check.”
Adrian looked past him at me.
“You’ve had an upsetting day. These things can become confusing when people start suggesting memories.”
I gripped the photograph.
He had a pale scar across the base of his thumb.
A short white line.
I knew that scar.
Not from a picture.
Not from a report.
I knew a hand reaching across a seat.
The smell of cigarettes trapped in wool.
A gold ring striking glass.
My breath stopped.
Adrian saw me looking at his hand.
He put it into his coat pocket.
Too late.
“Olivia?” Dante said.
I looked up.
The kitchen, the corridor, Rosa’s hand near my elbow—all of it seemed terribly far away.
Adrian shook his head once.
A tiny movement.
Almost a warning.
And suddenly I wasn’t twenty-six anymore.
I was small.
Cold.
Trying to pull air into my chest while rain blew through an open car door.
I heard my own voice, thin and frightened.
“You were driving.”
Nobody moved.
Adrian’s expression emptied.
Dante turned toward him.
I took one step back.
“You were driving the car.”
CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING PART 3 — THE MAN WHO SAID I WAS DEAD
Story by Dramaverdict
