CHAPTER EIGHTEEN — The Other Woman

LENA'S POV

I could not stop thinking about the photograph.

Margaret had slipped it into my hand on the way out of the meeting room, pressed it against my palm quick and deliberate like she had planned to do it the whole time and waited until the last possible moment. A photograph. Small and slightly worn at the edges like it had been handled many times.

A woman I did not recognize.

I looked at it the whole drive back to the compound. Rook was driving. Ghost was in the passenger seat making calls in a low voice. I sat in the back with the photograph in both hands and looked at the woman's face and tried to find something familiar in it.

She was maybe late forties in the photograph. Dark hair. Serious eyes that looked directly at the camera without flinching. She was holding a newspaper. Today's date on the front of it.

This photograph was recent.

On the back in Margaret's handwriting it said she was before you. She is still alive. Edmund has her.

I turned it over again and looked at her face.

She was before you.

I did not know what that meant yet. Before me in what sense. Before me in Edmund's life. Before me as a victim. Before me as something else entirely.

I looked at the serious eyes looking back at me from the photograph and felt something I could not name yet pulling at the edges of my chest.

Ghost came to find me that evening.

I was in my room with the photograph on the bed in front of me and the documents Margaret had given us spread around it. I had been looking at them for two hours. Most of it was beyond me legally but the names and dates were clear enough and what they described made me feel cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

Ghost knocked and I said come in and he came in and looked at the documents spread across my bed and then at the photograph and then at my face.

He sat down in the chair across from me.

He did not say anything immediately. Ghost never rushed into the thing he had come to say. He got there in his own time and when he got there it was always worth waiting for.

"The photograph," I said. "You know who she is."

He looked at the photograph on the bed between us. Something moved through his expression. Slow and deep and carefully controlled.

"Yes," he said.

"Who is she."

He looked at me directly. "Her name is Anna Graves," he said.

I waited.

"She is your biological mother," he said.

The room went very quiet.

I looked at the photograph. At the serious eyes and the dark hair and the newspaper held in steady hands. I looked at the face I had been staring at for two hours trying to find something familiar and understood now why it had felt like looking at something I almost recognized.

Because I did recognize it.

Not consciously. Not in any way I could have named before this moment.

But somewhere underneath everything I looked at that woman's face and knew it the way you know something you learned before you had words for knowing things.

"She is alive," I said.

"Yes," Ghost said.

"Edmund has her."

"Yes."

"For how long."

Ghost was quiet for a moment. "Twenty years," he said.

Twenty years.

I was twenty two years old. Which meant Edmund had taken her when I was two. Which meant I had spent twenty years of my life not knowing my mother was alive. Not knowing she existed. Growing up in a house with people who sold me and never once telling me that the woman who gave birth to me was being kept somewhere by the man they eventually sold me to.

I pressed both hands flat against my stomach.

The babies moved slowly underneath my palms.

"My father," I said. "David Graves. Does he know."

"He believes she is dead," Ghost said. "Edmund showed him a death certificate twenty years ago. He has been grieving her ever since."

I looked at the photograph.

I looked at Ghost.

"You knew," I said quietly. "Before tonight. You knew who she was."

He held my gaze. "I found out during my early investigation into Edmund," he said. "I was waiting for the right time to tell you."

"Ghost."

"I know," he said. "I know it was not my decision to make."

"No," I said. "It was not."

He did not look away from the weight of that. He let it land the way it needed to land without trying to soften it. "You are right," he said. "And I am sorry."

I looked at the photograph again.

The anger was there. Real and valid and mine. But underneath it something larger was moving. Something that had nothing to do with Ghost keeping information from me and everything to do with a woman in a photograph holding today's newspaper with serious eyes that looked directly at the camera without flinching.

Like a woman who had been waiting to be found.

"Where is she," I said.

"Margaret gave us a location," Ghost said. "I have people looking into it tonight."

"And my father."

"I can take you to him," Ghost said. "When you are ready. He is not far."

I looked at him across the small space between the chair and the bed. At the man who had known something enormous about my life and had been carrying it carefully until the moment he could give it to me without it destroying something.

I was still angry.

I was also sitting across from someone who had looked at my whole situation and decided that protecting me long enough to be strong enough to receive this truth was more important than telling it to me too soon.

I did not know yet if I agreed with that decision.

But I understood it.

"Tomorrow," I said. "Take me to my father tomorrow."

Ghost nodded. "Tomorrow," he said.

He stood up slowly and looked at the photograph one more time and then at me.

"She has been writing to you," he said quietly. "Journals. Every year. I found references to them in the documents. She never stopped."

I looked at the photograph.

At my mother's serious eyes looking directly at the camera.

Not giving up.

Not disappearing.

Just waiting.

"Go," I said to Ghost. "Let me sit with this tonight."

He nodded once and walked to the door.

"Ghost," I said.

He stopped.

"Find her," I said. "Whatever it takes. Find her."

He looked back at me over his shoulder and what was in his expression was not a promise exactly but something more certain than a promise.

"Already working on it," he said.

He closed the door quietly behind him.

I sat alone with the photograph and the documents and twenty two years of not knowing and let myself feel all of it without trying to make it smaller than it was.

My mother was alive.

Her name was Anna Graves.

And Edmund Hale had stolen twenty years from both of us.

He was going to pay for every single one of them.