Chapter Five: Portland

The drive from Seattle to Portland was three hours and forty minutes.

Mariah knew this because she had looked it up four times in the past week. Not because she had forgotten, but because checking it again made the whole thing feel more real.

She left at nine in the morning with a bag she had packed and repacked twice, Zara's voice still in her ear from the night before.

"Call me the second anything happens."

"Nothing's going to happen."

"Mariah. You're driving three hours to meet a boy you've only heard through a phone screen. Everything is going to happen."

She laughed then.

She wasn’t laughing now.

She was somewhere on I-5. Rain had started tapping lightly against the windshield. Her hands were steady on the wheel.

Her heart was doing something completely different.

She stopped at a gas station just outside Portland.

The kind of place people only passed through. One pump. A tired cashier. A shelf of snacks nobody planned to buy until they were already holding them.

She grabbed a drink and was heading back to the door when something on the bulletin board caught her eye.

She almost didn’t stop.

There was no real reason to.

But she did.

The board was covered with overlapping papers. Lawn services. A missing cat named Gerald. Someone selling a dining table.

And pinned slightly off-center, with a bright new pin in old soft paper, was a printed flyer.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?

A baby photo. Newborn.

The date beneath it was eighteen years ago.

Mariah read it the way you read things that don’t concern you. A quick glance. Mild curiosity. Already ready to move on.

Female infant. Portland. Distinguishing birthmark.

She looked at it one more second.

Then she tucked the drink under her arm and walked back to the car.

It never occurred to her to think about it again. There was no reason she would. She had somewhere to be. Someone is waiting. Three weeks of phone calls about to become something real.

She pulled back onto the highway.

The flyer stayed on the board.

The bright new pin stood out against the old paper.

Anthony was waiting outside when she arrived.

She recognized him immediately. Not from the photo, which had been dark and half-lit, but from the way he stood.

Hands in his pockets.

Calm.

The posture of someone comfortable with quiet.

He smiled the moment he saw her car.

She parked. Got out. Stood three feet away from him on the pavement.

They looked at each other.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," she answered.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Then he laughed softly. The kind of laugh that comes when something feels bigger than expected.

"You're real," he said.

"You sound surprised."

"I'm not surprised. I just—" he stopped and smiled. "Hi."

"You already said that."

"I know." He stepped closer. "I'm going to hug you. Is that okay?"

"Yes."

He hugged her.

And it felt strange.

Not like meeting someone new.

More like the end of something long.

She closed her eyes and said nothing.

His house was warm.

It smelled like coffee and something baked earlier in the day. The kind of home that felt properly lived in. Photos on the walls. Wear marks in the hallway. A kitchen that looked like real meals happened there.

"Mum's just finishing up upstairs," Anthony said. "She'll be down in a second."

Mariah nodded and looked around the living room.

Her eyes moved across the wall of photographs.

Anthony at different ages, always with the same quiet expression beneath everything else. Growing older beside a woman who looked at him in every photo the way people look at something they are afraid of losing.

Lucy Donalds.

Mariah studied her face without knowing why.

Something about it bothered her slightly. Something she couldn’t place. Like a word sitting just out of reach.

She was still looking when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

Lucy walked into the room.

And stopped.

Not dramatically. Anthony had turned toward the kitchen and didn’t see it. Just half a second of complete stillness.

Then she crossed the room with a warm smile and held out her hand.

"Mariah," she said. "I've heard so much about you."

"All good things, I hope."

"Every single one."

They shook hands.

Lucy held on just a moment longer than necessary, and Long enough to look.

The line of her jaw. The shape of her eyes. The way she stood.

Long enough to confirm what she already knew.

"Let me get you both something," she said smoothly. "You've had a long drive."

She turned toward the kitchen before either of them could see her face.

Lucy stood at the counter with both hands pressed against the cold surface.

She breathed in slowly through her nose.

She had imagined this moment for years. Not as something that would truly happen, but as a fear that visited her late at night before she locked it away again by morning.

She had always believed she would have more time.

That the world was large enough to keep certain things apart.

She had been wrong. She looked at the mugs in front of her. She told herself to pick one up.

She told herself to breathe.

She told herself nothing had to happen today. Knowing was not the same as speaking. She had kept this secret for eighteen years.

She could keep it one more day.

Her hands were still flat on the counter.

From the living room she could hear Anthony laughing at something Mariah had said.

Lucy closed her eyes.

Then she picked up the mugs.

She became a mother again and walked back into the room.

They sat together for almost an hour.

It felt easier than Mariah expected. Lucy was warm and funny and asked questions that felt truly interested instead of polite. She laughed easily and listened in a way that made it feel like her full attention was on you.

Mariah liked her immediately.

She didn’t know why that made her feel slightly uneasy.

At one point she excused herself to use the bathroom.

On her way back down the hallway she paused without meaning to.

Anthony’s voice from the living room. His mother replied. Low and warm. The easy rhythm of two people who had spent a lifetime learning each other.

Mariah stood quietly in the hallway and felt something pass through her.

Not sadness and not the hollow feeling either.

Something different, something she had no name for.

She looked down at her hand resting against the wall.

And without thinking, the way she had done a thousand times before, she reached back and touched her left shoulder through her shirt.

The small raised curve of skin just below the blade.

A habit so old she barely noticed it anymore.

She let her hand fall.

She walked back into the living room, sat beside Anthony, and smiled when he looked at her.

The afternoon continued.

Outside, Portland rain tapped softly against the windows.

Lucy excused herself at some point to check something upstairs.

Anthony's phone buzzed and he stepped briefly to the window to answer it.

Mariah sat alone in the living room for the first time.

The quiet settled around her comfortably. She looked at her hands in her lap. Then at the room. Then at the wall of photographs again, the way your eyes return to things without permission.

She smiled at the ones of Anthony. The serious baby face that had clearly become the serious adult face standing ten feet away from her.

Her eyes moved along the row and stopped.

One photo near the end. Anthony newborn, hours old at most, that particular raw newness that babies have before the world has touched them at all.

Lucy in a hospital bed holding him, exhausted and luminous the way new mothers were. The room around them is dim and quiet.

Mariah looked at it for a moment.

Then her eyes drifted to the edge of the frame.

Barely visible. Almost entirely cropped out by whoever had taken the photo.

The corner of a bedside table, on it, so small she had to lean slightly forward to be sure she was seeing it correctly, a hospital bracelet.

Pink plastic in a newborn size.

Anthony's was presumably on his wrist somewhere out of frame. So whose was that.

Mariah looked at it for one more second.

Then Anthony came back in from the window, phone in his pocket, already saying something, and she looked up and smiled and the moment passed the way small moments do, quietly and completely, leaving no mark.

She didn't think about it again, not consciously.

During the rest of the afternoon, while she unpacked her bag, she texted Zara.

“I'm here. It's good. He's better in person.”

But that night, lying in the guest room with the house quiet around her and Anthony's voice still warm in her mind, she found herself staring at the ceiling for a long time before sleep came.

She couldn’t have explained why.

She never could with these things.

She just felt it the way she always did…things she had no name for.

She closed her eyes.

But this time the hollow feeling beneath her ribs, the one that had been quiet since Anthony, the one she had carried her whole life without knowing why…was back.

Louder than it had ever been.

Outside, Portland rain hit quietly against the window.