CHAPTER 16 LYRA
LYRA
In Greek mythology, Pandora had unleashed death, sickness, and assorted evils onto the world the moment she’d opened the box. No amount of slamming the lid down could undo it, just like Lyra couldn’t take back what she’d revealed to her mother on the phone.
You remember? Her mom’s initial, shocked response still echoed in Lyra’s mind hours later, as Grayson turned onto a long, winding dirt road. The BMW he was driving had been waiting for them when they’d landed at a private airstrip in northern Kansas.
The farther down the dirt road they went, the more clearly Lyra could hear her mom in her mind: You remember?
Oh, baby—come home.
Either you come to me, Lyra Catalina, or I’m damn well coming to you.
Grayson hadn’t even hesitated. He’d called Alisa, who had arranged for a jet.
And now, in what felt like the blink of an eye, Lyra was sitting in a BMW on a gravel drive she knew all too well, Eve’s file on her lap.
It was one in the morning, but the porch light was still on.
Lyra had always loved that wraparound porch, loved the white rocking chairs and the blue porch swing that looked out on Kane land as far as you could see.
Mile’s End.
Lyra opened her car door, and Grayson followed suit. He was wearing shoes that almost certainly cost more than some cars, but he didn’t seem to give dirtying them in gravel a second thought. By the time he and Lyra reached the stairs up to the porch, the front door was open.
“You came.” Lyra’s mom flew down the steps and engulfed her in a hug.
No matter what else she was feeling at the moment, Lyra could never shrug off her mother. She hugged her back, breathing in the familiar smell of lavender and coffee and Mom.
“And…” Her mom pulled back and shot Lyra a look. “You aren’t alone.”
In any other circumstances, Lyra would have responded with a look of her own, one that said Behave, Mom, but Lyra didn’t have it in her to sink into that kind of comforting back-and-forth right now.
She took a step back. “Mom, this is Grayson. Grayson, this is my mom.”
“You can call me Darby.”
“And you can call me Keith,” a voice said from the porch. “Or Coach.” Lyra looked up to see her dad, who opened his arms. Despite everything, Lyra ran up the steps and into them like she was nine years old.
Down below, Grayson held out a hand to Lyra’s mother. “Grayson Hawthorne,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you start from the beginning, Lyra?”
The kitchen table at Mile’s End was large, a testament to the size of the families who had sat around it in generations past. Lyra knew each and every chip in the old wood, and she pressed her fingers into one, a soothingly familiar groove, as she replied to her dad’s suggestion: “You two first.”
Her parents were seated next to each other, across from Lyra and Grayson, none of them at the head of the table.
“Tell me what you should have told me years ago,” Lyra continued quietly. “Tell me about my fourth birthday.”
Her mom was the one who replied. “We tried to tell you, baby. For more than a year, with three different therapists, we tried, but they all told us to take your lead, and you never said a word about what had happened—not to the therapists, not to us, not in play, not even if someone else started the story as a fairy tale and asked you what should happen next. You showed no signs of regression. You displayed no hallmarks of trauma, not even a hint that you remembered that day at all. You were just—” Her mom smiled in what Lyra recognized as an attempt not to cry. “A very happy little girl.”
“A normal girl.” The words caught in Lyra’s throat, because when the memories of that day had resurfaced, that was what she’d lost. Feeling normal.
Feeling right. Feeling real. Afterward, she couldn’t even dance without feeling like she was pretending, like she was a fraud.
But Lyra hadn’t come home to try to explain that to her parents, not after years of going out of her way to avoid doing exactly that.
Lyra had come here to make sense of Eve’s file and the man in those pictures. “You said that this was Tomás.” Lyra opened the folder and turned it around toward her mother. “My biological father. But this isn’t the man who took me.”
“You thought Tomás took you?” Lyra’s mom stared at her. “Why in the world would you think that?”
Because the man who took me told me he was my father. Because the teachers said he had my eyes.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning, Darby?” Grayson co-opted Lyra’s dad’s earlier suggestion, gentle but no-nonsense tone and all. “The morning of Lyra’s fourth birthday. She remembers bits and pieces, but she needs to hear it from you.”
On the other side of the table, Lyra’s mom reached for Lyra’s dad’s hand and then spoke. “You woke up at the crack of dawn that morning,” she told Lyra, “and I made you Wonder Cakes for breakfast. That’s what we called pancakes with cream cheese icing and—”
“Rainbow sprinkles,” Lyra finished. Her body felt odd—not numb exactly, but like she wasn’t quite in it anymore.
Her dad picked up where her mom had left off. “We put candles in the Wonder Cakes, and you blew them out and made your wish. You weren’t forthcoming on the exact details, but you did let on that your wish involved cotton candy and a tractor.”
Lyra knew somehow that beneath the table, her dad was running the fingers on his free hand over one of the grooves. Like father, like daughter.
“We were going to keep you home from preschool,” her dad continued, his jaw visibly clenching, “to spend the day with us, but you wanted to go.”
“You insisted on wearing a new dress and your soccer cleats.” Lyra’s mom smiled slightly.
“There was no talking you out of it. We apologized to your teachers about the cleats, but they took it in stride. You adored them and that school.” Anger and pain flashed across Lyra’s mother’s face.
“We never brought you back again. After.”
Lyra’s dad’s jaw visibly hardened. “Those teachers we trusted, those teachers you loved so much—they just gave you to him. Didn’t even ask for his ID. Just handed you over like it was nothing, like you were.”
“Your dad hadn’t adopted you yet.” Lyra’s mom’s eyes blazed like hellfire.
“But the school knew your bio-father wasn’t involved, that he had no custody.
And then a man waltzes in off the street, claiming you’re his, and they just hand you over?
Because his hair was black, and his skin was the same color as yours, and that was apparently all it took. ”
Lyra had never looked a thing like her mother.
“You’re saying that the man who took me wasn’t my father—he only claimed to be?” I went with him. They handed me over, and I went. “But I remember—” Lyra gritted out the words. “He had my eyes, not just brown but amber. The teachers kept saying he looked just like me.”
I’m your father, Lyra. Words rang through her memory.
Lie-rah.
Lie-rah.
He’d pronounced her name wrong, like he’d only ever seen it written down.
Grayson slipped his hand into Lyra’s beneath the table. “What happened next?” he asked her parents calmly. “From your perspectives.”
“I went to pick Lyra up, and she wasn’t there.
They told me her dad had her, so I called Keith, and that’s when the school clarified what they meant.
At first, I assumed that it had been Tomás.
I hadn’t seen him in years, but he was always a smooth talker, always conning someone out of or into something.
Then the school’s director pulled up some security footage, and I realized that the man who’d walked out of that school with my little girl—I’d never seen him before in my life. ”
Someone had taken Lyra—just not her father.
“We called nine-one-one, but my baby…” Lyra’s mother let go of her father’s hand to reach across the table.
“You were gone, Lyra. They put out an Amber Alert, tried to identify the man’s car—and then around nine o’clock that night, they found you, barefoot on the pavement, on the street right outside the sheriff’s office. ”
Lyra flashed back to running out into the night, but this time, as she attempted to grab on to the memory, to force it to solidify into something more than smoke and fog, she realized: “Running—but not away from the house where it happened.”
Had there been a car? She couldn’t remember.
“What house?” Lyra’s dad asked. “And what happened there, Lyra? Your mom said that on the phone, you mentioned a gun.”
For years, Lyra had believed that her parents knew: what she’d seen, what she’d lived through. But it was clear now that they hadn’t known. They’d known she was taken. They’d known she’d come back, but that was all.
“The man who abducted me…” Not my father. It was never my father. “He took me to a house.” Lyra flipped back through Eve’s file. “Nine-four-seven Onomo Crescent. Three towns over.”
Lyra’s mother took possession of the file, and Lyra watched as her parents read through it. She knew the instant they got to the crime scene photos.
He blew off his own face.
Lyra’s mother visibly gritted her teeth but kept turning pages. And then she got to the driver’s license.
“Tomás.” Lyra’s mom drew in a shaky breath, then flipped into mystery-writer mode.
“According to this report, authorities found this body two days after Lyra was taken and less than forty miles away. Level of decomposition was consistent with death thirty-six to forty-eight hours earlier. The deceased was a recent kidnapping victim’s biological father, his death coincided with the timing of the kidnapping, and somehow that just never came up in their investigation? ”
No one made that connection. Because no one dug deep enough to realize that Thomas Valasquez wasn’t his real name. Because this case was tied up with a billionaire’s bow. Because Alice Hawthorne was the Hand, and she wanted me kept out of it.