Chapter 6: Before Anyone Else Does

HAUNTED BY THE MAFIA KING

By Ann E.

Lila POV

Chapter 6: Before Anyone Else Does

The taxi drops me at the gate at ten to six, and the house is lit up like a ship.

Every window on the ground floor is bright. My father's car sits at an angle on the gravel, as though he left it in a hurry, and the front door opens before I reach it.

"Where have you been?"

Mum stands in the hall in yesterday's silk blouse. Her hair is pinned, but badly. She holds her phone in one hand and a cream envelope in the other, and she looks at me the way she has never looked at me in my life, as if I am something that might leave.

I know what I must look like. The green dress, creased. Shoes in my hand. Hair loose on my shoulders, with no pins in it at all. I can still smell him on my skin, rain and cedar and something warm underneath, and I fold my arms across my ribs as though that might hide it.

"Out," I say.

"Out where?"

"You called fourteen times. I'll answer you when you've answered me. What's happened?"

Her mouth opens. Shuts. Behind her, in the sitting room doorway, Dad appears in a suit, shirt buttoned to the throat, at six in the morning on a Sunday. Vanessa stands behind him in a silk dressing gown, arms crossed, wearing the expression she gets when someone else has taken the room.

Nobody says where have you been. Only Mum. Only once.

"Come in," Dad says. "Sit."

The sitting room smells of coffee nobody has drunk. Mum sits opposite me with the envelope in her lap. Dad stays standing by the fireplace, one hand on the mantel.

"Lila," Mum says. "Have you spoken to anyone about your medical records?"

I stare at her. "My what?"

"Your blood type. Your birth details. Has anyone contacted you? A hospital, a clinic, a solicitor?"

"You asked me about my blood type on the phone. Yesterday. For a form."

"Yes."

"Is there a form?"

She doesn't answer.

"Mum. Is there a form?"

"Don't interrogate your mother," Dad says.

"I'm not. I'm asking a question." My voice is steadier than I feel. "She's called me fourteen times, and she's sitting there holding an envelope, and nobody has said a single true thing since I walked in."

Vanessa makes a small, exasperated noise. "God, Lila. It's six in the morning. Can you not make this a drama?"

"Where's your hairpin?"

I almost don't hear it, it comes so lightly. She tilts her head, pleasant as a pane of glass.

"The little gold leaf. You've worn it all week." Her eyes move over my loose hair, my crumpled dress, my bare feet. "Did you lose it?"

My hand rises to my head before I can stop it. The gap above my ear feels enormous.

"It's somewhere safe," I say.

"Is it?"

"Vanessa," Dad says. "Enough."

She shrugs and sits back. But she is looking at me a beat too long, and I file it away, the way I've learned to file everything in this house. She asked about the hairpin. Why did she ask about the hairpin?

"Someone has written to us," Mum says at last.

She holds up the envelope. It is thick, cream, with a typed address and a firm's name embossed in one corner. Hale & Ardent, Solicitors. I don't know it.

"They represent a party who wishes to remain anonymous," she says. "They've asked us to confirm certain details about the circumstances of your birth. For their client's records."

"What details?"

"Routine ones."

"Then why are you frightened?"

The room goes still.

I have never said that to her before. I've thought it, a hundred times, across tables and staircases and in the quiet at the end of telephone calls. Now it's out in the air, and it doesn't take it back.

Mum's fingers tighten on the paper.

"I'm not frightened."

"Your hand is shaking."

"Lila." Dad's voice carries the weight of a closing door. "This is a clerical matter. It will be handled by the family's lawyers. All you need to do is confirm your date of birth and where you were born."

"Westbrook General."

"Yes."

"I've been told that my whole life."

"Then there's no difficulty."

He says it too fast.

I look from him to her. Neither of them looks back.

I have spent twenty-two years in this room, at this exact angle, watching people not look at me. I know all the ways. The napkin straightened, the glance at the clock, the sudden warm interest in somebody else's glass. I know what it looks like when a family has decided what I am allowed to know.

But this is different. This time they aren't telling me what to feel. They are asking me questions and answering none of mine, and I realise they didn't call me home because they needed me.

They called me home because they needed to know what I'd already found out.

"I'd like to see the letter," I say.

"Out of the question."

"It's about me."

"It's addressed to the family."

"It's about my birth."

"Lila." Mum stands. The envelope disappears behind her back like something she's embarrassed to be holding. "Please. Go upstairs. Rest. We'll talk once Mr. Hale has called back."

"Mr. Hale?"

Her mouth tightens. She has said a name she didn't mean to.

Her phone rings.

She glances at it, goes pale, and walks out into the hall with the envelope tucked under her arm and the phone pressed to her ear. I hear her say, low and quick, "Yes. Yes, I know. No, not the ward. The archive. Before Friday," and then the door of the study closes.

I should go upstairs. I know I should.

Instead I look at the coffee table.

Mum was careless. In her hurry she set down the first page, only the first page, on the glass. It lies face up between the cold cups. Dad is watching the study door. Vanessa is watching me.

I pick up my phone as though to check a message.

I don't touch the paper. I only tilt the screen, the way you do to read a menu in bad light, and press my thumb to the side.

Click.

It makes a small, plastic sound. Dad turns.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking the time."

"Give me the phone."

I look at him.

It isn't a decision I know I'm making until I've made it. I slide the phone into my pocket, still looking at him, and I say, quite calmly, "No."

The word sits in the room.

I have said no to my father, I think, perhaps three times in my life. Once about a dress. Once about a boy. Once, at fifteen, when he asked me to apologise to Vanessa for something I hadn't done, and I stood in the hall with my fists shut and said no, and he took my allowance for a month.

He takes a step toward me.

"Dad" Vanessa's voice, strangely sharp. "Leave it. She's overwrought."

It is the closest thing to protection she has ever offered me, and it frightens me more than anything else this morning.

Dad stops. His jaw works.

"Until we understand what's been asked of us," he says, "you will not discuss this with anyone outside this house. Not your friends. Not that boy. Nobody."

"That boy is called Jason."

"I don't care what he's called."

"Why does it matter who I talk to?"

"Because I'm telling you it does."

I look at my father, at the neat suit and the tightness at his mouth, and I understand something so quietly that it doesn't feel like a shock. It feels like a stone settling.

I am not in this family. I live in it. They are different things.

I stand.

"I'm going to my room."

"Good," Mum says, returning from the hall. Her face has been put back together. "Sleep, darling. You look dreadful."

Darling. The word has come out warm. It hangs there, exactly the temperature of a lie.

My bedroom is cold and smells of lavender and dust.

I lock the door. I don't take off the dress. I sit on the floor with my back against the bed, where the carpet is worn pale from all the nights I sat exactly like this, and I take out my phone.

The photograph is crooked. The lower third is lost in glare. But the top half is sharp, and the typed lines are clear enough.

Re: Verification of birth registration. St. Anne's Maternity Hospital, Ridgemont.

I read it twice.

I've been told, my whole life, in the voice that's used for facts, that I was born at Westbrook General. There is a framed card on my mother's dresser. A hospital tag in a drawer. A story about a snowstorm, and a taxi, and Dad forgetting the camera.

I've never heard of St. Anne's.

Down in the hall, Mum's footsteps cross the marble, and Dad's voice says something low, and the study door opens and shuts again. Nobody comes upstairs.

I run my thumb across my bare hair. Where a small gold leaf would be.

Then I open the search bar, and type the name.

The screen goes white, and slowly, one line at a time, begins to fill.