Chapter 24
RILEY
I stand in the doorway of my room, and I don't know why I can’t bring myself to leave.
The bed is stripped, the pillows stacked on the chair. The books are lined up on the shelf—the thriller I didn’t finish, the travel guide to Patagonia, the cookbook where I dog-eared the page with the bolognese recipe, even though we oversalted it.
It’s a bare room in a brick house in the middle of the desert. Four walls, a window that won’t open, and a mattress where I lay awake for nights on end staring at the ceiling. There is no rational reason why saying goodbye should be this hard.
And yet, I stand here feeling something that closely resembles nostalgia.
"Ready?" Vaughn asks from behind me.
I turn around. "I think so." I cast one last look over my shoulder. "It’s strange. I moved in here as a prisoner. And now it feels like I’m leaving something familiar behind."
"Do you want to take Gerald with you?"
I have to laugh. "The cactus stays. He belongs here."
I walk past Vaughn through the hallway, and my fingers brush against his hand.
A wild mixture of emotions floods through me because I’m angry with him, and hurt, and confused—and because he’s still the only one who makes any sense in my life right now, which is probably the craziest part of this whole crazy story.
Outside, a black Mercedes is waiting. The same car that brought me here weeks ago. The same driver who didn’t say a single word back then.
He’s leaning against the hood. Sunglasses, crossed arms, broad shoulders. When he sees me, he straightens up and takes off his glasses.
"Valentino," he says. His voice has a slight accent. "Pleased to see you under more pleasant circumstances."
He opens the rear door, then goes to the driver's side and gets behind the wheel.
I look at the open door. Then at the desert around us. Then at Vaughn, who stands beside me, waiting.
I get in. Voluntarily.
***
The drive lasts an eternity.
Nevada creeps past the window. Dusty highways, gas stations that look like movie sets, small towns with big churches and empty parking lots. Then Idaho—greener, hillier, the sky lower. And finally Oregon, where the rain starts as if someone had flipped a switch.
I sit in the back seat and watch the world change. The desert gives way to fields. The fields give way to forests. The sand becomes earth, the heat becomes a chill. It’s as if I’m driving through different chapters of my life—from what was, to what could be.
Vaughn sits next to me. He doesn’t talk much, and I’m grateful for it. Not because I’m mad—I am that too, but that’s not the point right now. But because a storm is raging in my head that words cannot calm.
Riley Thompson.
The name sounds foreign. Like a garment someone holds out to me and says: This is yours, put it on. But I don't know if it fits.
Howard and Loraine Thompson.
I say the names silently to myself, forming them with my lips without making a sound. Howard. Loraine. My father. My mother. Two words I had reserved for other people my whole life, and which are now suddenly supposed to take on new faces. Faces I’ve never seen.
What if they look at me and feel nothing?
What if twenty-seven years is too long?
What if the woman stepping out of this car isn't the baby they remember, but a stranger with red hair and too many questions?
Somewhere in Idaho, I grow tired. The hours in the car, the emotional exhaustion of the last few days, the steady hum of the engine—it all presses me into the seat like a warm hand. My head sinks against Vaughn’s shoulder, and I drift off.
***
"Riley."
I blink my eyes as Vaughn’s voice brings me back to the here and now.
The light has changed—it’s evening, the sky over Oregon a leaden gray that smells of rain. Through the glass, I see streets gleaming wetly, houses with lit windows, trees whose leaves sway in the wind.
"How much further?" I ask.
"Seven minutes."
Seven minutes. My heart begins to race, as if someone had doubled the tempo. My hands clench in my lap.
"What if they don’t want to see me?" I say.
"They’ll want to see you."
"You can't know that. It’s been twenty-seven years. They’ve built a life without me. Maybe they’ve closed the chapter on their daughter."
Vaughn turns to me. "Every year on March fourteenth, Loraine Thompson posts a photo of a single candle. No text, no explanation. Twenty-seven candles in twenty-seven years. On March fourteenth. On your birthday, Riley."
The tears come without warning. I blink them away, but they come anyway, hot and fast, and I wipe them with the back of my hand as if they were a malfunction I needed to fix.
"And if I’m not what they imagined?" I whisper. "If I’m not good enough?"
Vaughn reaches for my hand. His fingers close around mine, warm and firm.
"You are more than enough."
I look at our interlaced hands. Then into his face. And there, behind the control and the calculation and the thirty years of revenge, I see something that looks like the truth.
Not the truth about my father or the adoption or the marriage contract. But the truth about him. About us. About what can grow between two people when everything is taken from them except each other.
Valentino turns into a quiet side street.
One-story houses with wooden porches and well-kept front yards.
Hydrangeas, rose bushes, bicycles in driveways.
A neighborhood where children play in the street and people chat over the fence.
The exact opposite of Las Vegas. The exact opposite of my life until now.
The car stops.
"Number twelve," Valentino says. "On the left."
I look out the window. A small house with a white facade and a blue roof.
The front yard is lovingly tended—rose bushes, a stone path to the door, a wooden bench under the kitchen window.
On the side of the house hangs a wind chime made of colored glass, shimmering in the evening light and tinkling softly.
A light is burning in the window.
My heart hammers so loudly I’m convinced Valentino can hear it from the driver's seat. My hand is on the door handle, but I hesitate.
"I’m coming with you," Vaughn says.
"No." I shake my head. "I have to do this alone."
For a moment, he looks like he wants to argue. Then he nods.
I open the door and step out.
The air is cool and damp and smells of earth and rain and something blooming that I can't name. Under my new sneakers, the wet gravel of the driveway crunches. Then I’m standing in front of the house where my biological parents live, and my legs feel as if they are about to buckle under me.
The wind chime tinkles softly above my head as I stand before the front door. Through the frosted glass, I see a blurred light and the shadow of movement.
My hand trembles as I lift it.
I ring the bell.
In a brief moment of panic, I consider running away, but then I hear footsteps behind the door.
And then the door opens.
A woman stands in the glow of the light. Mid-fifties, I would guess, slight build. She’s wearing a cardigan over a simple dress, and her hands are damp, as if she’s just finished the dishes.
Her hair is red. Darker than mine, threaded with gray, but unmistakably the same red. And her eyes—green, deep green, with golden flecks around the pupil—are my eyes. Exactly my eyes. As if I were looking into a mirror showing me thirty years older.
Her hand flies up and presses against her lips.
She knows who I am. Before I’ve said a word, she knows.
"Hi," I say. My voice breaks. "I think I’m... my name is Riley."
Loraine Thompson’s knees give way. She reaches for the doorframe to keep from falling. Her eyes fill with tears that run down her cheeks without her wiping them away.
"My baby," she whispers. "My baby."
Then she pulls me into her arms. Her hands grip my hair, my back, my shoulders, as if she had to make sure I was real. She smells like something I can't name, but it feels like a memory I never had.
I cling to her, my face in her shoulder. My tears on her cardigan. For twenty-seven years, I didn't know I was missing something. And now, in the arms of a woman I’m seeing consciously for the first time, I realize that the empty space in me was never empty. It was reserved for this moment.
From inside, I hear heavy footsteps. A tall man appears in the hallway, broad-shouldered, with a beard that’s more gray than brown. His eyes are blue, not green, but his chin—my chin, square and a little too wide—I recognize instantly.
Howard Thompson stops and looks at his wife, who is clutching a young woman with red hair and crying. His face cycles through every emotion a human face can experience in three seconds.
Then he wraps his large arms around both of us.
The three of us stand on the porch of a small house in Oregon. The wind chime tinkles over our heads. The evening sky grows dark. And from a car at the curb, a man with silver-streaked hair and a broken plan watches as the woman he kidnapped comes home for the first time in her life.