Homecoming

Seraphina landed at Heathrow on a Tuesday morning in a thin London rain.

Luna was asleep in her car seat by the time they got back to the house in Notting Hill. The nanny carried her upstairs. Seraphina stood in the foyer with her coat still on and her suitcase still by the door and listened to the house breathe around her.

Home.

She had forgotten what the word meant for a while there.

She walked through the ground floor without turning on the lights. Kitchen. Sitting room. The sunroom where she sometimes sketched designs at four in the morning when she could not sleep. The shelf with Luna's books. The framed photograph on the mantle of Luna on her second birthday, face smeared with cake.

She stopped in front of the photograph.

In the photograph, Luna was laughing at something off camera. Her eyes were enormous. Wide. Dark brown. His eyes.

Seraphina had stared at that photograph a thousand times without letting herself see it. Now that Damien had stood ten feet from her daughter and caught her coming off a slide, Seraphina could not unsee it. The dimple. The shape of her jaw. The particular slope of her eyebrows when she was concentrating.

Her daughter wore her father's face.

She turned the photograph face down on the mantle.

Then she turned it back up again. She was not that woman anymore. The one who hid things in drawers and turned photographs over and pretended.

Her phone buzzed.

A text from Damien.

"Landed safely?"

She stared at the message for a long time before she typed back.

"Yes. Thank you."

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

"Tell Luna I said hello."

Then, a minute later, another message.

"Do not tell her who I am. I remember. Just. Tell her hello."

Seraphina set the phone down on the kitchen counter and pressed her hands flat against the marble.

She had spent three years building a wall between Aria and Seraphina. She had laid every brick herself. She had bled for that wall.

And in one week, without lifting a single brick, Damien Cross had walked right through it like it was not there at all.

The kettle boiled. She made tea. She sat at the kitchen island and drank it and watched the rain run down the window.

She thought about Damien in her kitchen making breakfast. She thought about Luna climbing onto his lap like she had known him her whole life. She thought about the way Damien had crouched in front of her in the sitting room to tell her about Marcus, the way he had gone down to her level instead of standing over her, the small and enormous thing that had been.

She thought about the text from the airport.

She thought about the photograph on the mantle.

She was tired of thinking.

Her phone buzzed again. A different number. Unknown.

She almost did not look.

But something in her gut told her to look, and she had learned, in the last three years, to trust her gut the way other people trusted their mothers.

She looked.

The message was a single line.

"Welcome home, Mrs. Cross."

The cup slipped out of her hand. Hit the island. Tea splashed across her sleeve.

The same number from the airport.

Whoever it was, they had tracked her flight. They knew she was back in London. They had been watching since New York.

She did not move for a long moment.

Then she picked up the phone. Opened her security app. The one Lucas had set up for her two years ago, when a disgruntled former employee had sent her one too many emails. She tapped the panic option.

Within ninety seconds her doorbell rang.

Two men in suits. Her private security team. They had been stationed on the corner since Luna was born. She had forgotten, sometimes, that they were there.

"Ma'am. Threat notification."

"Someone has been texting me. Unknown number. Twice now. Please trace it. I want to know who."

"Yes, ma'am."

She closed the door. Leaned against it.

In the upstairs nursery, Luna slept.

In the photograph on the mantle, her daughter laughed with her father's eyes.

And somewhere out in the world, a stranger knew a name Seraphina had buried three years ago, and was using it to remind her that burial was not the same as dead.

She slid down the door and sat on the marble floor of her own foyer with her knees pulled up to her chest, and for the second time in less than a week, she felt the old Aria pressing at the inside of her skin, wanting out. The girl who cried. The girl who trusted. The girl who had walked into a rainstorm in a ruined dress and let it nearly kill her.

Seraphina pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw white spots.

"Not tonight," she whispered to the girl inside her. "Not tonight. I do not have room for you tonight."

The girl went quiet.

Seraphina stood up. Wiped her face. Locked every door in the house one by one, ground floor to top floor. Checked the windows. Kissed Luna on the forehead without waking her. Sat down at the kitchen island with the tea she had not finished and waited for the sun to come up.