Chapter 14
My dead parents gazed at me from the screen as though they hadn't been entirely dead all this time, as though they'd merely been waiting for me to stop being a good little girl and start asking questions.
I lay in the guesthouse medical room beneath a blanket that smelled of medicine, old wood, and someone else's care, unable to tear my eyes from the newspaper clipping.
My mother. My father. Two faces that had never really been faces in my memory, only blurred patches in my foster-care file: *deceased*, *no relatives located*, *no assets*.
Three dry phrases in place of a family. Three government-issued nails driven into the coffin of my past. But now the screen showed a woman with my eyes, except her gaze still held the quiet confidence I'd never possessed because I had grown up among people who rationed safety.
Beside her stood a tall, fair-haired man with one hand resting on her shoulder, and there was so much protection in that hand that my throat suddenly closed.
He wasn't holding her like property. Not like something displayed at his side.
He held her as if the world might be dangerous, but as long as she stood beside him, he would place himself between her and the blow.
I had never known a touch like that.
I had only believed I did.
Black letters glowed beneath the clipping: “Your daughter has survived a second time. How much longer will you remain silent?” And the most terrifying thing wasn't that someone had known my parents.
It wasn't that this person had kept silent.
The most terrifying thing was the word *second*.
Which meant I had survived the first time too.
I hadn't simply happened not to be in the car.
It hadn't simply been fate sparing me. Someone had witnessed an earlier attempt to get rid of me along with them.
And stayed silent. For years. While I grew up in foster care, wore other people's sweaters, learned not to ask for an extra slice of bread, thanked the staff at the group home for old books, and then thanked Adrian for a cage with heated floors.
Someone had known that I had parents, a name, an inheritance, perhaps even people who could have taken me in.
And they had stayed silent long enough for my orphanhood to become the foundation of someone else's empire.
"Who sent the message?" I asked.
My voice was calm. Too calm. I heard it myself and felt afraid. Sometimes a person stops screaming not because the pain has eased, but because everything inside her capable of making a sound has finally burned away.
Graham Lawson held the phone at an angle so the light wouldn't hurt my eyes.
He was silent for several seconds, studying the message's technical data as though he could reach through the screen, seize the sender by the collar, and drag them out of the past. There was no pity on his face.
Thank God. Pity would have crushed me completely.
I didn't need a hand stroking my head. I needed a knife to cut the truth open.
"It's a burner number," he said. "But the attachment came through an old private mail server. Not a mass-market service. Whoever sent it is careful, but not a professional."
"Or a professional trying to look like an amateur."
He regarded me with something close to approval.
"That's possible too."
Andrew stood by the door holding a mug of coffee and muttered darkly:
"I'd start with everyone who worked for the Hales. Drivers, lawyers, security, housekeepers, doctors. Someone drove the child around, filed the paperwork, buried the parents. You can't erase an entire family without leaving a single tongue alive."
"You can if you pay those tongues well enough," I said.
"Money runs out. And sometimes fear grows old."
Dr. Irene Foster snapped my chart shut.
"And sometimes patients forget they've been ordered to rest."
I turned my head toward her.
"Dr. Foster, if you tell me I shouldn't get upset right now, I'm adding it to the list of evidence of cruel and unusual treatment."
"Go ahead. I'll sign it. But I'm still taking your blood pressure."
She came over and wrapped the cuff around my arm, and the ordinary gesture suddenly felt monstrously absurd.
The world was collapsing, my parents were returning from a newspaper clipping, Adrian was threatening to take my child from the gates outside, Vivian was almost certainly rewriting more medical reports, and someone was checking my blood pressure.
But perhaps life held together because of foolish procedures like this.
Because someone said, “Keep your arm relaxed,” while other people tried to have that same arm declared legally incompetent after the fact.
"It's high," Irene said.
"Shocking. It must be the joy of a family reunion with newsprint."
She gave me a stern look.
"Sarcasm doesn't lower blood pressure."
"No, but it improves the quality of survival."
Andrew snorted softly. Graham didn't smile. He was still looking at the photograph of my parents, and there was something in his silence that made me colder. Not pity. Recognition. He, too, was looking at dead people who had once been denied the chance to tell their side.
"I need to know who sent that message," I said.
"We will find out."
"No. Not eventually. Now."
Graham turned toward me slowly.
"You barely survived the night."
"My parents didn't survive at all."
"And you want to join them because you can't wait?"
I clenched my teeth.
"Don't say that."
"Then don't make me."
We stared at each other, and I was so angry with him I could almost cry.
Because he wouldn't let me fall apart beautifully.
He wouldn't let me charge barehanded into the past. He wouldn't let me make pain my strongest argument.
Adrian had always used my emotions like a door handle: press down, and I opened.
Graham did the opposite. He put a lock on the door and told me to think before deciding whom to let in.
It infuriated me. It saved me. That was the most infuriating part.
"You promised me a strike," I reminded him.
"A strike isn't the same as hysteria."
"I'm not hysterical."
"Not yet."
"You are impossible."
"But consistent."
The phone vibrated again.
This time the message wasn't from an unknown number.
It was from Kyle, whom Irene had just put to bed in the next room and forbidden to move, though apparently the walls were the only things in this house that obeyed orders.
Graham opened it. “I remembered the name. There was a woman in the old correspondence about the Hale archive: Tamara Keys. Former manager of the Hale household. Vivian Mercer referred to her as ‘an old fool who remembers too much.’”
Tamara Keys.
The name meant nothing to me, yet my body reacted before my memory did.
Somewhere deep beneath the layers of group-home hallways, beneath the smell of bleach and cream of wheat, beneath the staff members' voices, something small flared to life: warm hands, the scent of apple preserves, a wool shawl, a woman's voice saying, “Lana, sweetheart, don't run on the stairs. Your father will see you and start grumbling.” I inhaled sharply. The room swam before my eyes.
"Lana?"
Irene bent over me at once.
"I..."
My fingers dug into the blanket.
"I remember her."
Everyone fell silent.
Even Graham.
The memory didn't come back whole. It didn't swing open like a door.
It cracked, and through the narrow gap came the scent of the past. A woman with gray at her temples, a gentle palm, a big kitchen, a white cup painted with red berries, little me sitting on the windowsill and swinging my legs while someone laughed in the next room.
Not the group home. Not Adrian. Not hospitals.
Home. A real one. Mine. I covered my mouth with my hand because a sound escaped me that was half sob and half laugh.
"They said I didn't remember anything," I whispered. "At the group home. In the records. They said I was too young, that the accident had traumatized me, that there were no relatives and no one close to us."
"How old were you?" Graham asked.
"Eleven. Almost twelve."
He exchanged a look with Andrew. I saw it.
Eleven wasn't a baby. At eleven, a child remembered the smell of her home, faces, names, a favorite cup, the voice of the woman who ran the household.
If they had convinced me I remembered nothing, someone had tampered with my memory too.
It didn't necessarily require drugs. Sometimes all it takes is repeating one version to a child for years until she begins to believe her own flashes of memory are dreams.
"Tamara may be the person who sent the message," Andrew said.
"Or the person it was sent to," Graham corrected.
"The message wasn't addressed to Lana. “How much longer will you remain silent?” That's directed at a witness. Someone may be pressuring Tamara. Or using us to try to reach her."
"Find her," I said.
"Already on it," Andrew replied, pulling out his phone. "I know someone with access to old databases. Officially, he's an honest man, which is why he charges so much."
"Andrew," Irene said.
"What? I didn't say he was dishonest. I said honesty is expensive these days."
While Andrew made the call, I looked again at my parents' photograph.
My mother was smiling slightly to one side, away from the camera, as though someone had called her.
Maybe it had been me. Maybe little Lana had been racing through the garden with muddy knees and my mother had turned at the sound of my voice.
The thought hit so hard I nearly doubled over, but Irene caught me by the shoulder.
I didn't know these people, and at the same time I suddenly understood that they were exactly whom I'd missed all my life.
Not the abstract parents described in forms. This woman with my eyes.
This man with his hand on her shoulder. The home where I was called sweetheart instead of “Hale girl, don't get in the way.”