Chapter 17: A Face I Knew

For a long time nobody spoke.

Natalie slid slowly down the kitchen cabinet until she was sitting on the floor with her knees pulled up. I stayed on the sofa with my fingers pressed to my mouth. Outside the window, a siren rose and fell. A neighbour’s television laughed at something, a bright, canned burst of sound in the silence.

“You’re sure?” I whispered.

“I’ve seen his face in my sleep for three weeks,” Vanessa said. “I thought he looked kind. That’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about. He had these warm eyes, and I thought that man would never hurt anyone.” She laughed, a wet, ugly sound. “And then he walked into this apartment last night with his hands out like he was approaching a frightened animal, and I knew exactly what he was.”

“What?”

“A man who is very good at being trusted.”

My skin prickled. I thought of Mason in Grace’s kitchen doorway, of the calculation behind his sorrow. I thought of the card on Patience Mensah’s table.

Last month.

“He told me my grandmother hired him eight years ago,” I said slowly. “He showed me her handwriting.”

“People can forge handwriting,” Natalie said from the floor. “Or buy a letter. Or steal one.”

“He knew where Grace lived.”

“Then he’s been there,” Natalie said. “Before last night.”

I stood up and walked to the window. The parking structure across the street was a grey honeycomb of concrete. Somewhere in the city, a man was probably getting into his car and wondering why I hadn’t answered his text.

“What do we do?” Vanessa asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Not yet. If he knows we know, he’ll disappear. Or he’ll do something worse.” I turned around. “He wants me to trust him. So let him think I do.”

Natalie stared at me. “Amelia, that’s insane.”

“It’s the only thing we have.” I held up my hands. “He’s the one person who knows the whole story and wants to tell me the parts that suit him. If I pretend to believe him, I can find out which parts he’s leaving out.”

Vanessa looked as though she wanted to argue. Instead she wiped her face on her sleeve and said, in a very small voice, “Then I’ll help.”

I’ll admit that for the next two hours I was not brave. I was just busy.

Natalie set up her laptop on the coffee table and called up everything she could find on the Los Angeles Times archive from the week of October 12, twenty-two years ago. Vanessa, who had always been the quicker typist, took the second laptop and ran searches on every reference in the clipping. Bel Air couple. Newborn daughter. St. Anne’s Hospital. October 11. I sat between them with my father’s notebook in my lap and my mother’s cheque stub spread across my knee like a hand of cards.

“Here,” Vanessa said, after an hour. “A follow-up article. Two weeks later.” She read aloud. “‘A private funeral was held Saturday for the infant daughter Alexander Blake and Mrs. Mary Blake of Bel Air. Mr. Blake, Chairman of Blake Global Group, declined to comment.’”

I felt something strange. A small, cold click, like a key turning in a lock I hadn’t known was there.

“Blake,” I said.

“The shipping people,” Natalie murmured. “Blake Global Group. They have companies all over LA. You’ve seen those blue containers a hundred times.”

I had. That very week, in the Uber, I’d watched thousands of them slide past. Blue boxes with a white stylised wave on the side.

“M.B.,” I whispered. “Mary Blake. The handkerchief.”

Natalie typed Mary Blake into the search bar, and a page of results unfolded. A charity gala at the Beverly Wilshire. A foundation for maternal health. A magazine profile, Los Angeles Magazine, with a glossy full-page photograph.

She clicked the photograph. It filled the whole screen.

A woman in her late forties, in a cream silk dress, sat on a pale sofa with her hands folded in her lap. Her hair was swept back from her face. She had high cheekbones and a long, graceful neck, and a small, patient smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. A faint crease sat between her brows, the mark of a woman who had been sad for so long that it had become part of her face.

I knew that face.

I knew it the way you know your own reflection in a dark window. The curve of the jaw. The slight tilt of the head. The way her left eyebrow lifted a fraction higher than her right.

I put my hand against my own cheek.

“Amelia,” Natalie breathed.

“She looks like me.”

“She looks exactly like you.”

Vanessa had gone very quiet. When I glanced at her, she was staring at the screen with her hand over her mouth and tears running down her face.

“That’s her,” she whispered. “That’s your mother.”

I read the caption underneath. Mrs. Mary Blake, founder of the Audrey’s Foundation, which funds neonatal care for low-income families. “Every child deserves a chance,” she says. “I know what it is to lose one.”

Audrey.

I whispered it into the quiet room. It sounded like a name I’d known all my life and forgotten.

“Audrey,” I said again. “That’s what they called me.”

“The Audrey Foundation,” Vanessa said, scrolling. “She started it fifteen years ago. In memory of a daughter who died at birth.”

“She didn’t die.” My voice cracked on the last word. “She was taken.”

The three of us sat very still. I could hear the refrigerator humming, and my own breathing, and somewhere far off a train.

My mother, I thought. My real mother. She’d been living in a house across the city all these years, running a charity in my name. She’d given a speech in my honour at the Beverly Wilshire while I’d been sitting in a classroom in Baldwin Hills eating a cheese sandwich.

“I have to see her,” I said.

“Amelia, it’s too dangerous.”

“I know.” I wiped my eyes. “I’m going to do it anyway.”

“What will you say to her?” Vanessa asked softly.

I thought about it. “I don’t know. I’m sorry I wasn’t there seems like the wrong way round.”

Natalie reached over and took my hand. “You say whatever comes out. She’ll know.”

I looked at the woman on the screen, at the tired, patient eyes. I had spent twenty-two years believing I had been wanted by no one in particular, a daughter people tolerated and relied on and forgot to thank. It had never crossed my mind that a woman in a cream silk dress had been standing at a graveside the whole time, grieving the wrong thing.

My phone buzzed on the table.

Mason Brooks: Good evening. I hope you’re resting. I have news about Grace, and about the notary. May I come by?

I looked at the screen for a long moment. Then I looked at Natalie, and at Vanessa. They were both staring at me.

I typed: Yes. Please come.