The Woman In The Lobby

Damien crossed the lobby with his hands in his coat pockets and his eyes on the woman by the window.

She was sitting in a green velvet armchair with the morning paper folded across her knee, a small espresso cup balanced on the side table beside her. She looked up before he was halfway across the room. Her gaze landed on him, and held.

Pale grey eyes. Sharp cheekbones. Silver hair cut into a precise bob. A face that had been beautiful once and was now something more interesting than beautiful, which was striking. She was perhaps sixty five. She did not stand. She did not smile. She watched him approach the way a chess player watches an opponent's hand move toward a piece.

"Mr. Cross."

She knew him.

He stopped two paces from her chair.

"You have me at a disadvantage."

"I doubt that very much."

He registered the accent. Not Italian, not Spanish. Something further north. Possibly Swiss. Possibly Belgian. Old money, whichever it was.

"You asked the doorman for Aria. Why."

"Because I would like to see her."

"That is not an answer."

She tilted her head. The motion was small. Calculating. The way Aria sometimes tilted her head when she was deciding whether someone was worth the truth.

Damien felt the back of his neck prickle.

"My name is Catalina Voss. I am a private citizen. I have flown from Paris to speak to your wife about a matter that concerns her family. I would prefer to do so without attracting attention. I am happy to wait until she is ready to receive me."

"She does not have any family."

Catalina's mouth moved. The shape of it was not quite a smile.

"That is what she has been told. It is incorrect."

He went very still.

"What does that mean."

"It means I am her mother."

The lobby was quiet around them. The doorman was pretending to read his clipboard. A delivery man came through the front door, dropped a parcel on the desk, left. The world went on. Damien did not move.

"Aria's mother is dead."

"Aria's adoptive mother is dead. I am her biological mother. We have never met. She does not know I exist. I have known where she was every day of her life since the moment she was born, and I have never once interfered. I am breaking that rule today because she is in danger, and the danger is mine to answer for. I would like to come upstairs."

He stared at her.

Adoptive mother.

The phrase moved through his head and rearranged things he had thought he understood. Aria had been raised by a single mother. A nurse. The woman had died of cancer when Aria was sixteen. Aria had spent two years in foster care after that and aged out at eighteen. Damien had paid for the headstone himself when they got married.

That woman was not Aria's biological mother.

The world had a new shape.

"What danger."

"I will explain that to her, if she will see me. Not to you."

"You will explain it to me first."

"Mr. Cross."

"You will explain it to me first."

Catalina set the espresso cup down on the table. Slowly.

"There is a woman who has been watching your wife. I assume you know this. I assume you have a security team and a name by now. The woman's name is Rose Taylor. She has been in London for eleven days. She is staying at the Doric Hotel in Islington under her own name. She is dangerous."

"Why is she dangerous."

"Because she is also my daughter."

Damien sat down on the edge of the armchair across from her. Without permission. Without thinking. His knees had stopped wanting to hold him up.

"Aria has a sister."

"Aria has a twin sister. I gave Rose up for adoption six hours after they were born. Aria stayed in the hospital. I had been told Rose was being placed with a stable family. The placement failed within two years and was never disclosed to me. Rose has spent the last thirty one years moving between situations, none of them stable, and four years ago she found out who I was. She blames me. She blames Aria. She blames anyone who has had what she did not have, and the list is long."

Damien rubbed his forehead.

"And you are telling me this now because."

"Because Rose has stopped sending text messages and started smoking under your wife's window. Which means the next thing she does will not be a text message. I would like to be in the house when that happens. I have spent a long time preparing for this conversation. I would prefer not to have it on the wrong side of a locked door."

He looked at her for a long time.

Then he stood and held out a hand to help her out of the chair.

"Come upstairs."

She took his hand. Stood. Her balance was steadier than her appearance suggested.

As they walked toward the elevator, she spoke without looking at him.

"Mr. Cross."

"Yes."

"You threw my daughter into the rain three years ago."

He stopped walking.

"I did."

"I want you to know that I have considered, on six separate occasions, having you killed for it. I want you to know that I have a person on retainer in Marseille who would have done it for the price of a small sailboat. I want you to know that the only reason I did not, in any of the six instances I considered it, was that I did not want my daughter to wake up in a world where someone had murdered the man who had hurt her, because that wound is mine to manage and I refused to add to it."

Damien did not move.

"I understand."

"You do not. But I appreciate the politeness of saying so."

She started walking again. He followed.

"Mr. Cross."

"Yes."

"What you do for her now is between you and her. I have no opinion. I am here for Rose and for my granddaughter. Do not mistake my willingness to be in the same elevator as you for forgiveness. I will never forgive you. That is also between you and her, and not my business. But know that I am watching. I have been watching for thirty one years. I have not stopped."

"Yes, ma'am."

She pressed the button for the seventh floor.

"Good. Then we understand each other."

The elevator climbed.