Chapter 3

When I used to ask whether he missed me, he'd say, "Lina, love is something you carry in your heart. It doesn't need to be said out loud all the time."

There was noise at the front door, and a small, piping voice rang through the house.

"Mamma! I'm home!"

The little boy came running in with his backpack still on and buried himself in Nora's arms. She bent and caught him and kissed his cheek.

"You're home, baby. Were you good at school today?"

He hung off her neck.

"Of course I was! They gave out chocolate pudding at school and I brought mine home for you!

"I know it's your favorite."

I stared at the red mole beside his right eye, and I couldn't stop shaking.

The same place, the same color, exactly as I had memorized it after the delivery, right before they closed the chamber.

This boy was plainly the child I had nearly killed myself to bring into the world.

And he called Nora "Mamma" so easily, so fondly, as though she were the woman who bore him.

The nanny took him upstairs to change out of his uniform. I wrestled with it for a long time before I could force the words out.

"He doesn't look much like you."

Nora sighed, and her face didn't change at all.

"The poor thing's had a hard start. His birth mother died right after she delivered him. Vito and I didn't want him growing up hurt by that, so we've always told people he's mine. He's been with me since before he can remember, and as far as he's concerned I'm the only mother he's ever had."

My fingers closed around the arm of the sofa until the knuckles went white.

My son didn't merely fail to recognize me. He had never been told a birth mother existed at all.

In seven years of memory, there was no such person as me.

Nora got up and headed for the kitchen.

"Stay put. I'll squeeze you some orange juice."

I noticed how clumsy she was with the knife. It took her ages of fiddling before the juicer finally started to hum.

She laughed at herself, a little embarrassed.

"I don't really do housework. We used to keep a chef, but I'm a picky eater, so Vito taught himself to cook. He does every meal now.

"He's honestly good at it. I'll make him show off later so you can try some."

Every word ground against something raw in my chest.

My stomach used to be bad. I'd wake before dawn with cramps. There were nights the pain sweated straight through my pillowcase, and I bore it in silence because I was afraid of waking Vito and ruining his next day at work.

For the years we were together I cooked him something different every day. I always thought his research wore him out, so I never let him near the kitchen, never let him take on a chore, and handled every last thing myself.

Three whole years, and I never even learned that he could cook.

I never tasted a single thing he made.

Nora brought the juice over and teased me as she handed it across.

"I always assumed a research type like Vito had to be rigid and dull. Then we got together and it turns out that when he decides to be romantic, he's lethal."

She took out her phone and scrolled her photos to show me.

In one of them Vito stood in a loud Hawaiian shirt under the neon of Coachella, glow stick up, laughing without a shred of restraint.

"Last year work was crushing me, so he dragged me out to California. He went wilder than I did."

She kept swiping, and a photo of their marriage certificate came up.

The date was March 15, seven years ago.

The third month after I was frozen.

That was when he married someone else.

Nora colored a little.

"It's a funny story, actually. We met through work. Vito came in for a magazine interview and I was shooting his cover.

"I'd just come out of a relationship, I was in a bad place, and I had no interest in dating anyone.

"He didn't care. He came by my studio every single day and told me it was love at first sight. We got married two months after we met."

Something enormous closed around my heart and squeezed until I could barely draw breath.

He had been chasing her while I was barely settled in the chamber.

The sweet talk, the reckless heat of the pursuit, all of it happened after I went under.

That beautiful picture he'd painted, the one where he and our child waited for me to open my eyes and we were a family again, had been a lie he laid down in advance.