Chapter 10: The Name

Lorenzo left sometime near midnight, after extracting a promise from Isabella—low-voiced, at the door, in words Anastasia wasn’t meant to hear but caught fragments of anyway—that she would lock every window, that she would call a number he wrote on a torn scrap of paper if anything at all felt wrong before morning. Anastasia watched from the kitchen window as his dark shape dissolved into the wet street. The moment the door closed, she found herself absurdly missing his solid, watchful presence. Isabella went to bed not long after, pleading exhaustion, her face grey with something deeper than tiredness. Anastasia didn’t press her. There didn’t seem to be any strength left in either of them for pressing. She should have slept.

Instead she lay awake for hours, staring at the same water stain on the ceiling she’d been staring at since she was young enough that it had once looked, to her, like the shape of a running horse, and listened to the apartment’s small sounds settle into silence around her—until, sometime past two, she heard Isabella’s door creak open, and soft footsteps cross toward the kitchen, and, beneath the hum of the refrigerator, the low murmur of a voice. Isabella was on the phone. Anastasia knew she shouldn’t listen. She rose anyway, drawn by the same restless unease that had kept sleep at bay all night, and crept close enough to the cracked kitchen door to catch pieces of a conversation conducted in careful, urgent whispers.

“—can’t keep doing this alone, you have to understand that, tonight proved—”

A pause, someone’s voice on the other end, too faint to make out.

“No. No, she doesn’t know the whole truth yet. I tried to tell her tonight, but I couldn’t find the words. Twenty years, and I still don’t have the words—”

Another pause, longer this time. When Isabella spoke again, her voice had dropped so low Anastasia had to press closer to the door frame to catch it at all.

“She’s not safe as long as she doesn’t know what she is. You know that better than anyone, you were there, you saw what happened to the ones who didn’t know to run—”

A ragged breath.

“Her name is Romano, not mine, not the name on her school records or her lease or anything she’s ever signed in her life, and every day I don’t tell her that is another day I’m gambling with something I have no right to gamble with.”

Anastasia’s whole body had gone very still, very cold, the word settling into her chest like something dropped from a great height. Romano. It meant nothing to her, and it meant, somehow, everything—some old, wordless recognition stirring beneath the surface of her mind, too deep to reach, too vague to name. She stood frozen in the dark hallway, one hand pressed flat against the wall to steady herself, and listened to the rest of the conversation slip past her in fragments she couldn’t fully catch, Isabella’s voice thick with a grief that sounded twenty years old and freshly torn open all at once.

“—I know. I know I should have told her the moment she was old enough to understand any of it. I told myself I was protecting her. I’ve told myself that for two decades, and maybe it was even true, in the beginning. But I don’t know anymore if I was protecting her or just protecting myself from having to watch her face when she finally learned what happened to the people who loved her before I did.”

Anastasia stepped back from the door, her pulse roaring in her ears, and made it as far as the hallway before her legs simply stopped obeying her, and she sank down against the wall, sliding until she was sitting on the cold floor with her knees drawn up to her chest, the pendant clutched so tightly in one fist that the silver dug painful crescents into her palm. Romano. She turned the word over and over, searching for some memory to hang it on, some fragment of the mother she couldn’t quite recall—a voice she’d never been able to reconstruct, a warmth without a face—and found, instead of memory, only a strange, vertiginous sense of falling, as though some floor she hadn’t known she was standing on had just given way beneath her. The kitchen had gone quiet. Isabella’s call had ended, or perhaps simply paused, and after a moment Anastasia heard footsteps approaching the hallway, and scrambled upright, wiping uselessly at her face, arranging herself into something that might pass, in poor light, for a woman who hadn’t just overheard the unraveling of everything she thought she knew about herself. Isabella found her there anyway, standing awkwardly in the dark hallway, and the moment their eyes met, something in Isabella’s face collapsed entirely.

“You heard,” Isabella whispered. It wasn’t a question.

“Romano,” Anastasia said, and her voice came out smaller and stranger than she intended, barely recognizable as her own.

“You said my name is Romano.”

Isabella’s hand rose to her mouth, and for a long moment she said nothing at all, tears finally spilling over and tracking silently down her face, twenty years of careful silence breaking apart in real time in the narrow hallway of the only home Anastasia had ever known.

“I wanted to tell you properly,” Isabella said finally, brokenly.

“I wanted to sit you down and explain everything, in order, so you’d understand why I did what I did, why I kept it from you as long as I did. Not like this. Not overheard in a hallway at two in the morning.”

“Isabella.”

Anastasia’s voice shook.

“Who is Romano? Why does that name feel like—”

She stopped, unable to finish, unable to name the strange, bottomless vertigo of a word that meant nothing and somehow, impossibly, meant everything.

“Why does it feel like it’s mine?”

Isabella reached for her then, pulling her into an embrace as fierce and desperate as any she’d ever given, her whole body trembling with the weight of twenty years finally, catastrophically, coming due.

“Because it is yours,” Isabella whispered against her hair, her voice breaking completely now, all pretense of careful composure gone.

“Because it’s the only name you were ever truly born with, and I took it from you the night I saved your life, and I have spent every day since wondering whether that was an act of love or the worst thing I ever did.”

Anastasia stood frozen in her caretaker’s arms, the word echoing through her like something dropped into still water, sending ripples out toward every corner of her carefully ordinary life—the flower shop, the pendant, the strangers who’d been watching her all week, the man with pale grey eyes who’d asked such careful questions about her mother’s necklace—and felt, for the first time in twenty-five years, the ground of her own identity begin, slowly and irrevocably, to shift beneath her feet.

“Tell me,” she whispered.

“Please, Isabella. Whatever it is. I need to know all of it now.”

And this time, finally, Isabella did not look away.