Chapter 4
“Tessa.”
I did not turn.
“Tessa, don’t do this.”
Don’t do this.
As if I were the one making a scene.
As if silence had not been the only thing I had ever done for him.
The elevator doors opened. Elena helped me inside. Dr. Hart stepped in beside us.
Just before the doors slid shut, I saw Margot crying into Bennett’s chest.
And Bennett looked over her shoulder at me with eyes full of something I had never seen in him before.
Not love.
Not remorse.
Recognition.
Like he had just realized the woman he thought he buried had a family.
And that family had teeth.
The labor and delivery ward smelled of antiseptic, warm blankets, and something faintly floral from a diffuser at the nurses’ station.
They moved quickly around me.
Blood pressure cuff. Fetal monitor. Ultrasound gel cold against my skin. Questions from nurses. Questions from doctors. Any bleeding? Any contractions? Where exactly was the impact? Did I fall? Did I hit my head?
I answered as best I could.
But all the while, Dr. Hart stood near the wall, silent and watchful.
The monitor filled the room with my daughter’s heartbeat.
Fast.
Too fast at first.
Then gradually steadying.
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
The sound entered me like mercy.
“She’s okay?” I asked.
The obstetrician, a kind-faced woman named Dr. Sloane, studied the screen.
“She has a strong heartbeat. Placenta looks intact. We’ll keep you for monitoring because abdominal trauma at this stage can be unpredictable, but right now, she is holding steady.”
I closed my eyes.
The first tear slipped out without permission.
I hated it.
Not because I was ashamed to cry.
Because Margot had wanted my tears, and now they came when she was not there to see them.
Dr. Hart stepped closer.
“Tessa.”
I opened my eyes.
She looked different now. Less like the director of a hospital. More like the woman in the torn photograph. Older, yes. Harder. But with the same storm in her face.
“You knew my mother,” I whispered.
Her throat moved.
“Clara was my sister.”
The name broke something open.
Clara.
My mother had died when I was seventeen, sitting in the driver’s seat of a car that had gone off a rain-slick road outside Flagstaff. Or that was what the police report said. By the time I met Bennett, I had trained myself to tell the story neatly. Mother dead. Father absent. No siblings. No inheritance. No one to call.
A clean biography.
Convenient for a man who liked things he could own.
“She told me you were gone,” I said. “Not dead. Just gone.”
Vivienne’s eyes glistened, but no tears fell.
“She thought I abandoned her.”
“Did you?”
“No.” The answer came fast. Then softer, “No. But I failed her anyway.”
The monitor continued its steady rhythm.
Dr. Sloane glanced between us. “We’ll give you a few minutes. Press the call button if you feel pain, pressure, dizziness, or decreased movement.”
When she left, the room grew quiet except for the heartbeat of my child.
Vivienne pulled a chair to my bedside.
“I searched for Clara for years,” she said. “Our father was powerful. Not Finch powerful, but powerful enough in the ugly ways that matter. When Clara got pregnant, he wanted to send her away quietly. She ran before he could.”
“With me?”
Vivienne nodded. “You were two months from being born. She called me once from a bus station. She was terrified. I told her I would come. By the time I arrived, she was gone.”
I stared at the ceiling.
May you like
All my life, I had thought my mother’s loneliness was ordinary. The kind handed to women who made bad choices and paid for them in grocery store coupons and secondhand coats.
But there had been someone looking for her.
