CHAPTER FIVE: ROSE LANE

"Amala, if you put one more sticker on your brother's forehead I am going to cry real tears, and you know I do not do that in public."

"Mama, he likes it."

"He does not like it."

"Yes I do," Alexander said solemnly from his seat across the aisle, a gold foil star stuck between his eyebrows. "Tell her I like it, Uncle Lucien."

"He likes it," Lucien said without looking up from his tablet. "You lost this round, Rose."

I let my head fall back against the seat of the private jet and I laughed, really laughed, the way you can only laugh when the thing you are laughing at is the sweetest problem you have ever had.

Seven years. Seven years and ninety-four days, if we were counting from the morning the delivery driver opened her passenger door for me on a road I had never driven down again.

I had counted every day the first year. Then I had stopped counting and started building. There had been nothing else to do.

The first apartment had been one room above Mrs. Ebele's bakery in Port Adenia. I had thrown up in a back alley at eleven weeks and known, before the pharmacy stick confirmed it, that I was carrying his child.

At fifteen weeks the ultrasound tech had turned the screen toward me and said, "Oh, here is the other one," and I had laughed until I cried.

Twins.

I had walked out of that clinic and thought, All right. For the two of you I will become something I was not.

I had taught myself to write. I had ghostwritten romance novels for a woman in Minnesota. I had designed interior layouts for a renovation blog that paid in exposure until the day it paid in a check.

Amala and Alexander were born in a public hospital on a Tuesday in April. Mrs. Ebele had held my hand. There had been no one else.

I had named my daughter Amala, which means pure, because I wanted her to grow up knowing that was the first word anyone had said about her. I had named my son Alexander, which means defender of men, because I had taken one look at his small furious face and known he was going to spend his life standing between the people he loved and the world.

I had not given them his last name. I had not given them his anything.

By the time they were two, my fourth novel, the first I had put my own name on, had been bought by a publisher in London for an advance that paid for a two-bedroom apartment facing the sea.

By the time they were four, my interior design studio, Lane House, had its first magazine cover.

By the time they were five, I had met Lucien.

Lucien Beaumont was a French-Senegalese architect who had tripped over Alexander at a dinner party. Alexander had been building a Lego cathedral under the table. Lucien had apologized to my son in grave French. Alexander, who had taught himself French from a cartoon, had apologized back. Lucien had looked up at me and said, Madame, your son has a better accent than my mother.

I had laughed, really laughed, the way I had not laughed with a man in five years.

We had never been in love. Not that way. We had tried for about a month, two years ago, and we had both agreed, over wine on a balcony in Lisbon, that we loved each other too much to force it. He had become, instead, the best friend I had ever had, the godfather to my children, the partner in my design studio.

He was also, inconveniently for the gossip columns of the country I was flying back toward, extremely handsome.

"You are smiling," he said now, without looking up from his tablet.

"I was remembering Lisbon."

"Which part?"

"The part where you told me I kissed like I was taking a hostage."

He laughed. "I stand by that."

I looked out the window. The clouds were thinning. Somewhere below, the coastline of the country I had been born in was going to rise out of the water.

I had not been back in seven years. I had not spoken to my mother. I had not spoken to my father. I had not spoken to my sister. I had not spoken to my husband.

Husband.

It was a word that had grown teeth. I was, legally, still a Caldwell. He had never filed for the quiet divorce he had promised his father in that bedroom. I had checked every year through a lawyer in Port Adenia. Every year the answer was the same. No filing. Mr. Caldwell has made no filing.

I did not know why. I had stopped trying to know why.

What I knew was that I was flying into my own country on a jet I had bought with my own money, with two children of my own blood, with a divorce petition drafted by my own lawyers in the leather folder on the seat beside me.

I had come home to end it.

"Mama." Amala's small warm hand slid into mine. "Is this where you grew up?"

"Yes, baby."

"Was it pretty?"

I thought about it. "Parts of it were very pretty. The sea was pretty. The light in the afternoon was like honey. There are some things you will love."

"And some things we won't?" Alexander asked. He was watching me carefully. He always watched me carefully. He had been born watching me.

I squeezed Amala's hand and looked at my son. "There are some people here, baby, who were not kind to Mama when she was young. And when we land, you might hear things or see things that are confusing. But you are going to be with me and Uncle Lucien the whole time. And nobody in this entire country is going to touch a hair on either of your heads. Do you understand me?"

Alexander's small jaw set. "If anyone is mean to you, Mama, I will bite them."

"You will not bite them."

"I will consider biting them."

Lucien choked on his coffee.

The pilot's voice came over the intercom. "Ms. Lane, we are beginning our descent into Astoria International. Twenty minutes to touchdown."

Rose Lane. That was the name on my passport now. Legally changed four years ago in a courthouse in Port Adenia on a Tuesday morning with Mrs. Ebele as my witness.

Rosalie Whitmore was a girl who had been dragged out of a kitchen by two guards. Rosalie Caldwell was a woman who had crawled out of a locked wing in bare feet. Rose Lane was somebody they were both going to be very proud of.

"Mama." Amala tugged my sleeve. "What is the first thing we are going to do when we land?"

"We are going to the house Uncle Lucien has arranged for us. We are going to put you to bed, because you are both going to pretend you are not jet-lagged and you are both going to be absolutely wrong about that. And then tomorrow morning, I am going to go into the city, and I am going to see a man I have not seen in a very long time, and I am going to hand him a piece of paper, and I am going to get on with the rest of my life."

"Which man?" Alexander asked.

I looked at my son. I had promised, the day I registered their births, that I would never lie to them.

"The man I was married to," I said, "before you were born."

Both children went very still.

They had known, for years, that there had been a man. I had told them the shape of the story without the sharp edges. Mama was married once to a man who did not know how to love her. Mama left before you were born.

They had never asked me the man's name. They had never asked, with the terrible clear-eyed curiosity children have, whether he was their father.

Until now.

Amala's hand tightened around mine.

Alexander, very slowly, pulled the gold foil star off his forehead and set it on his knee. He looked at it. He looked up at me.

"Mama," he said quietly, in the voice he only used in the dark, after the lights were out. "Is he our father?"

I had rehearsed this. I had rehearsed it in front of the mirror for a week. I had rehearsed it with Lucien over coffee. I had rehearsed it, once, out loud, to a therapist. I had an answer. A careful, honest, gentle, age-appropriate answer.

I opened my mouth to give it.

The intercom cut on again.

"Ms. Lane." The pilot's voice had gone tight. "I am sorry to interrupt. There has been a change at the ground. Astoria International has rerouted us to a private hangar on the north end of the field. We have been asked to taxi directly to a secured gate."

Lucien lowered his tablet.

"Rerouted by whom?" I said.

A pause.

"The request came through the Caldwell Group, ma'am. There is a car waiting on the tarmac. The passenger is listed on the manifest as Mr. Dante Caldwell."

The leather folder on the seat beside me did not move. The two small hands in mine did not move.

The jet began its descent. Outside the window, the coastline rose out of the sea.

He knew I was coming. He had been waiting.