CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nadia — Queens
“She rented it under the name Ilse Brandt,” he said, working the lock — a lock he had, disturbingly, a working key for.
“One of six aliases I’ve traced back to her over the years.
This one’s been paid up automatically through an account that’s still active, which tells me either she set it up to renew indefinitely before she died, or someone else has been maintaining it since. ”
“Someone else. You mean you.”
“I mean I’ve paid the renewal fee twice, yes, because I didn’t want the contents auctioned off before I understood what they were.” He said it without apology, which I appreciated more than I expected to — no performance of guilt, just a fact laid down plainly for me to do what I wanted with.
The unit, when the door finally rolled up, was smaller than I’d imagined and far more ordinary — a few boxes, a dust-covered dresser that meant nothing to me, and in the back corner, a child’s easel, paint-splattered, the kind you’d buy for a kid who’d shown an early interest in art.
My chest did something complicated. I hadn’t remembered the easel.
I hadn’t remembered a lot of things about the years before the accident, the years that were apparently not what I’d believed them to be, and finding a piece of my own forgotten childhood in a storage unit two hours from where I’d grown up felt like being handed evidence of a life I’d have to relearn from scratch.
“She kept this,” I said, more to myself than to him. “She was running for her life and she kept my easel.”
“She kept a lot of things that didn’t make sense for a woman trying to disappear,” Kael said carefully. “I’ve always thought that was worth paying attention to. People hide what matters most in the places that look the least important.”
We went through the boxes together — old photographs I didn’t recognize the woman in, tax documents under names that weren’t hers, nothing that resembled the files Vane and Sorokin’s inheritors had spent four years searching for.
It was Kael who found it, in the end, tucked into the lining of the dresser’s bottom drawer where a less careful search would have missed it entirely: a small brass key, unlabeled, worn smooth from handling.
“That’s not a storage key,” he said, turning it over. “Too small. Safe deposit, maybe. Or a lockbox.”
“So we’re not done.”
“We were never going to be done in one storage unit,” he said, and there was something almost like relief in his voice, the specific relief of a man who’d been carrying eight months of failure and had finally, in front of the one person whose opinion of that failure mattered most, found a reason to keep going that didn’t feel entirely hopeless.
I held the key in my palm, small and cold and impossibly significant, and felt the strange vertigo of standing at the beginning of an answer instead of the middle of a question.
Somewhere out there was a lock this key fit, and somewhere past that lock was the truth about what my mother had actually done, and who she’d actually been, underneath every name she’d worn to keep me safe.
“We’ll find the lock,” Kael said, watching my face the way he seemed to watch everything about me now — carefully, like I was something he was still learning the rules of. “Whatever’s in there. I’ll help you find it, and I won’t decide for you what you get to know once we do.”
I believed him. I want to be honest about how unsettling that was — how quickly I’d gone from fearing a man in a dark coat outside my gallery to trusting him with the last unanswered question of my mother’s life.
I didn’t know yet if that trust was wisdom or the same kind of dangerous curiosity that had gotten me into a car with a stranger’s promises in the first place.