CHAPTER 16 LYRA #2
“The dead man wasn’t Tomás.” Lyra was certain of that.
“But whoever he was, he kidnapped me and brought me to that house so that I could witness his death.” Lyra tightened her grip on Grayson’s hand.
“The bastard gave me a flower.” She didn’t specify what flower.
“And a candy necklace.” With only three pieces of candy.
“He wished me a happy birthday.” Lie-rah.
Lie-rah. Lie-rah. “And then he walked upstairs and shot himself—twice.”
Once in the stomach.
Once in the head.
“I saw the body.” Lyra tried her best not to whisper. She tried her best to be strong. “I remember… I remember stepping in his blood.”
Not her father’s blood but someone else’s. Whose?
“When the police found Lyra,” Grayson cut in, “was there blood on her feet?”
“No,” Lyra’s mom snapped. “There wasn’t a drop of blood on her.”
Lyra could feel her memory twisting, contorting. Bare feet on pavement. Blood on my feet. But was that one memory—or two?
“The authorities took her straight to the hospital.” Lyra’s dad was fighting tears now.
“The doctors examined her, and she was fine. No sign of—anything. The medical team noted that she seemed confused about how she’d gotten there.
She asked them why she wasn’t at school.
She asked where her soccer cleats were.”
“She lost time,” Grayson summarized. “Did they do a tox screen at the hospital?”
“They did, and it was clear,” Lyra’s mom said fiercely.
“There was nothing in her system. She had no memory whatsoever of what happened. She was fine, and eventually, even her therapy team agreed that if she truly didn’t remember ever being taken, maybe it was a blessing.
” She fixed her gaze on Lyra. “How long?” she demanded.
“How long have you been living with this all alone?”
“Three years, Darby.” Lyra’s dad was the one who answered. “It’s been three years.”
Lyra’s throat felt so dry she thought it might crack and bleed, but somehow, she summoned the strength to speak. “I thought you knew.” Every breath she took burned her lungs. “I thought Tomás took me. I thought I saw him die. And I thought you both knew.”
As horrific as all of this was, Lyra felt like she was being pieced slowly back together, because her parents very clearly hadn’t known the worst of it. They hadn’t kept it from her.
“None of this makes sense.” Lyra’s dad stood abruptly, walked over to the kitchen window, and stared out into the night.
“Dad,” Lyra said evenly. “You can’t demand answers.” She knew Keith Kane very well. He was a man of action. “You can’t call the sheriff’s department and raise hell in the morning.”
“Why not?” her dad said calmly.
“And does it have anything to do with the fact that there’s a Hawthorne in our kitchen?” Lyra’s mom added.
Not just a Hawthorne, Lyra thought, the words a low hum in her mind. My Hawthorne. The moment her brain issued that unlikely proclamation, Lyra flashed back to the first phase of the Grandest Game, to Odette telling her, Draw your Hawthorne, the way I once drew mine.
“Grayson.” Lyra suddenly made a connection they should have made as soon as it had become clear that there had been a cover-up, tied up with a billionaire’s bow. “Odette.”
Odette Morales was a lawyer and once-lover of Grayson’s grandfather’s who’d told them that she’d done a favor for the billionaire fifteen years earlier.
A favor that Alice Hawthorne had revealed herself to her husband to request. During the Grandest Game, Odette had told Lyra and Grayson that she didn’t know anything about Lyra’s father or his death, but the man who had really died at 947 Onomo Crescent—he hadn’t been Lyra’s father.
Technicalities. Loopholes. Odette was a master of them. She knows something about all of this. She knows more than she said. She has to.
Grayson stood. “If you’ll excuse me,” he told Lyra’s parents, “I have to make a call.”
Neither of Lyra’s parents said a word until they heard the screen door open and close, and then Lyra’s mom folded her hands on the table in front of her. “I have so many questions,” she said. “Beginning with: Can he sword fight?”
Lyra recognized the attempt to lighten the tone, but she was also pretty sure that if she wasn’t careful, the male lead in her mom’s next book might end up being the suit-wearing son of a billionaire. “Mom.”
Lyra’s dad snorted, and Lyra made the mistake of glancing at him, and once her dad’s steady eyes caught hers, there was no looking away.
Lyra had always been a daddy’s girl.
“I’m sorry, Lyra,” he said quietly. “Sorry about what you went through. Sorry we couldn’t prevent it and that you’ve been all alone with this for years.”
“You didn’t know.” Lyra’s voice was just as quiet as her dad’s.
“I knew something was wrong. Your mom and I, we both knew. We should have pushed you to tell us what.”
“Because that would have gone well,” Lyra’s mom said, walking to stand beside him, wrapping an arm around his waist. “Because no Kane in the history of the world has ever dug their heels in harder when pushed.”
“You aren’t actually suggesting she gets her stubbornness from me?” Lyra’s dad retorted.
“I plead the fifth,” her mom said, then she looked back to Lyra. “You needed space. We gave you space. But we would do anything for you, baby. You know that, right?”
Lyra knew.
“You’re ours,” her dad said gruffly, and Lyra knew that, too. She’d always known that. Her dad glanced out the window. “And for the record, that Hawthorne boy? I don’t like him.”
Lyra’s mom rolled her eyes. “Liar.”
“Not my fault no one’s good enough for her.”
“He’s a good person.” Lyra hadn’t meant for her voice to come out sounding like that. Soft. Sure.
Her mom smiled slightly. “Is he your person?”
This time, Lyra made sure her voice wasn’t soft. “We’ve known each other for four days, Mom.”
“Ask me how long it took for me to know with this gentleman,” Lyra’s mom replied, leaning into her dad. “This gentle man right here.”
“I’m not that gentle.”
“Keep telling yourself that, Keith.”
The front door opened again before either of Lyra’s parents could say another word. When Grayson stepped back into the kitchen, Lyra knew just by looking at him that he hadn’t gotten ahold of Odette.
Yet.
“Alisa’s on it,” Grayson said, meeting Lyra’s eyes. “She should have something for us in the morning. In the meantime, she says to try to get some sleep.”
Lyra had gotten a little at Toby’s, but at this point, Grayson had been up for thirty hours straight, and if he was even entertaining the idea of sleeping, Lyra was guessing Alisa had issued some pretty pointed threats.
“Come on, son.” Lyra’s dad clapped a hand on Grayson’s shoulder. “I’ll show you to the spare room.”
To Lyra’s surprise, Grayson didn’t argue. As her dad escorted him out of the kitchen, Lyra turned back to her mom. There was one more question she needed to ask, a question she hadn’t been able to bring herself to raise around her dad.
“Do you have any idea where Tomás is now—the real Tomás?”
He could still be involved in all of this somehow. There must have been some rhyme or reason to the decision to plant his ID on that body. Whoever did it would have needed to be sure he wouldn’t pop up somewhere immediately thereafter, drawing attention to himself, inconveniently alive.
“There is no real Tomás, baby.” Lyra’s mom came to sit beside her at the table. “The man could be anyone he wanted to be. Charming. Irresistible. I swear, he could talk anyone into anything.”
“You said you left him when I was three days old.”
“I know.” Her mom looked away, then down.
“But the truth is that he left me. More than once. Left and came back, left and came back, and I let him, again and again. I was naive and in love, and he was your father. We were together almost a year, but I never really knew the man. I barely knew who I was back then.”
“That’s hard for me to imagine,” Lyra said.
“It was my starving artist era.” Her mom shrugged.
“You saw the bangs. But being a mom, being your mom—it grounded me, Lyra. By the time I met Keith, by the time I met your dad, I knew exactly who I was, and I knew from the moment I met him, from the moment we met him, that Keith Kane was real. He was solid, what-you-see-is-what-you-get real.”
Lyra had never thought much about the fact that, growing up at Mile’s End, she’d always known what love looked like—real, solid, day-in, day-out love.
“And as it turns out,” Lyra’s mom said, reaching for her hand and giving it a little squeeze, “when you know who you are, when you know exactly who the other person is, falling in love can be as easy as just… letting go.” She smiled. “Ten days. That’s how long it took me to know with your dad.”
Lyra swallowed, unsure why she needed to.
“I should try to get some sleep,” she said.
In the morning, she and Grayson could try to find a way to obtain the file on her kidnapping without raising any flags at the sheriff’s office.
By morning, Alisa would hopefully have something to report back regarding Odette, and they could figure out their next move.
In the morning, Lyra couldn’t help thinking, as she made her way up to her old room and laid down on her old bed, it will be day number five.