Chapter 2 - The Sister She Buried Twenty Years Ago
Victoria Harrington did not do things by halves. When she decided to act, she moved like a force of nature — which was why, twenty minutes later, Lily found herself sitting in the back of a black car that was longer than her bedroom, holding a warm cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows that a man in a uniform had handed her through a partition, while Victoria Harrington made phone call after phone call in a voice that could have cut steel.
"Cancel the merger meeting. I don't care if he flies back to Tokyo. Reschedule. ... No, I said reschedule. ... Tell him I'll personally fly to Osaka next week. ... Yes. Next week."
She hung up. Dialed again. "Margaret? I need you to pull every file we have on the Harrington estate fire of 2003. Everything. Police reports, insurance claims, the works. And I mean everything — including the stuff my father had sealed. ... I don't care if it's a court order, Margaret, I own the firm that holds the court order. Get it done."
Lily sipped her hot chocolate and watched the city roll by. She was not sure if she was in trouble or in a dream. The car smelled like leather and something expensive, like the perfume counters at the department store she sometimes walked through to get warm in winter.
"Ms. Harrington?" she said finally. "Am I in trouble?"
Victoria looked at her, and the steel in her eyes softened, just a little. "No, sweetheart. You are not in trouble. I am so, so sorry if I frightened you. It's just — that ring. It belonged to my sister. Her name was Anna. She was five years old when she disappeared. I was twelve. There was a fire at our family's country house. Everyone thought — everyone assumed — that she didn't make it out. But they never found her body. I have spent every day of the last twenty-three years wondering if she was still out there somewhere."
Lily was quiet for a long moment. She turned the ring over in her hand. "My mom's name was Anna. She died when I was three. I don't remember her very much. Just — just her hands. And that she sang to me. Abuela says she had a beautiful voice."
Victoria's breath caught. She reached out, very slowly, and touched the back of Lily's hand. The child did not pull away. "Your grandmother — Rose? She raised your mother? As her own?"
Lily nodded. "Abuela says she found Mom after a fire. She was hurt really bad. She couldn't remember her name or where she came from. Abuela took her to the hospital and nobody ever came looking for her, so — so she kept her. She named her Anna. Because that was the only word Mom would say, over and over, when she was hurt. Anna."
The car stopped. Victoria had not even realized they had arrived. She looked out the window at the brick apartment building, with its chipped paint and its fire escape and its rows of windows where laundry hung like flags. This was where her sister had lived. This was where her sister had died. This was where her niece — her niece — had grown up selling roses on the street.
Something in Victoria's chest cracked open. It was a soundless, terrible thing, the sound of twenty-three years of grief finally finding its target. She had buried an empty coffin. She had said goodbye to a sister who was alive. And now that sister was gone for real, and she would never, never get to hold her again.
She pressed her hand to her mouth and cried. Not the polite, controlled tears of a boardroom defeat. Real tears. Ugly tears. The kind you cannot stop.
Lily, who had comforted her crying grandmother a hundred times, reached over and put her small hand on Victoria's arm. "It's okay. I cry too. When I miss my mom."
Victoria looked at this child — her sister's child, with her sister's dark eyes and her sister's stubborn chin — and she knew, with a certainty that shook her to her bones, that she would never let anything happen to her. Not ever.
They went up together. The apartment was on the fourth floor, walk-up, no elevator. Victoria's heels clicked on the concrete stairs, and she did not care. Lily knocked, and the door opened, and there she was — Rose Martinez, seventy-one years old, silver hair in a braid, hands gnarled with arthritis, oxygen tank beside her chair. She looked at Lily, then at the woman behind her, and then — she saw the ring hanging from Victoria's necklace.
The old woman's hand flew to her mouth.
"Oh, God," she whispered. "Oh, God in heaven. You found her. You finally found her."
She began to cry, great heaving sobs that shook her thin frame. Victoria stepped forward, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Then Rose reached out and took Victoria's hand, and Victoria sank to her knees in front of the old woman's chair.
"I'm sorry," Rose said, over and over. "I'm so sorry. I should have tried harder to find you. I should have — I should have put it in the paper, I should have gone to the police again. But Anna — your Anna — she didn't remember anything. Not her name, not her family, not even her own face. The doctors said it was trauma. They said pushing her would break her. And she was so happy, with me. She had a daughter. She had a life. I didn't want to — I didn't want to take that away from her."
Victoria shook her head. Tears were streaming down her face, but she was smiling through them. "You saved her. You saved my sister. You gave her twenty years of life and love and a daughter. I will never, ever be able to thank you enough."
Rose looked at Lily, who was standing in the doorway, wide-eyed, watching the two most important women in her life cry and hold hands. "Mija," she said gently. "Come here. There's something I should have told you a long time ago."
That afternoon, in a tiny apartment that smelled of cinnamon and roses and old wood, Victoria Harrington learned the whole story. She learned about the night Rose had been driving home from her sister's house in Connecticut and had seen the fire from the highway. She learned how Rose had pulled over and run toward the flames, and how she had found a little girl in a nightgown, burned and bleeding, wandering in the woods at the edge of the property, calling for her mother. She learned how Rose had taken her to the hospital, and how the police had listed her as a Jane Doe, and how, when no family came forward after six months, Rose had adopted her.
She learned that Anna had grown up beautiful and kind, that she had worked in a flower shop, that she had fallen in love with a man who left before Lily was born, that she had raised Lily alone with Rose's help, and that she had died of a brain aneurysm when Lily was three — fast, painless, in her sleep.
And she learned that, on her deathbed, Anna had given Rose the ring and made her promise one thing: that Lily would wear it always, because one day, someone would come looking for it.
"She knew," Victoria whispered. "Even with no memory, she knew. Some part of her remembered."
Rose nodded. "She used to have dreams. A big house. A sister with braids. A voice calling her name. She never knew if they were dreams or memories. But she made me promise. And I kept that promise."
Victoria looked at Lily, who had fallen asleep on the couch, the ring still clutched in her small hand. Outside, the sun was setting over the city, painting the walls gold. For the first time in twenty-three years, Victoria Harrington felt — not whole, never whole, not while Anna was gone — but complete. The circle had closed.
Or so she thought.
She did not know, as she sat there in that little apartment, that somewhere across town, a man named Marcus Blackwood was reading a text message on his phone. It was from a private investigator. It said: Harrington just met with the flower girl. DNA test pending. The sister is dead. The niece is alive.
Marcus Blackwood smiled. He poured himself a glass of scotch. And he picked up the phone to make a call that would change everything all over again.
May you like
"Hello, Daniel. I think it's time you came back to New York. You're going to want to hear this. The Harrington fortune just got a whole lot more interesting — and I think you and I are going to be very rich men."
He hung up. He smiled at his reflection in the window. And in that smile, there was not a single drop of mercy.
