Chapter 8

#Aveline

On the tenth day, I could stand on my own. My legs shook, and Ronan kept his hands out the whole time. He pretended he was not ready to catch me. I walked to the window and put my hand on the glass. It was cold. Outside, a gardener was raking leaves into piles.

Ten days before, I had been coughing blood in my car. It felt like it had happened to someone else.

"Don't get proud," Lucan said from the door. "You walk like a baby giraffe."

"You said I would be in bed for a month."

"I say a lot of things." He came closer, and he stopped joking. "Your scans came back this morning. The tumors are getting smaller. They are shrinking faster than I thought they would. I don't understand it yet."

I waited for the bad news. There was always bad news. But he just stood there, looking a little afraid of his own results.

"So I'm getting better," I said.

"You're getting better."

I put my hand on my stomach, where the pain used to be. Now I only felt the stitches pulling. I looked away from him because my eyes were burning.

That evening, the room filled up again, like it did every evening. Darius pushed a cup of tea toward me without looking up from his laptop. At six o'clock, Alistair came in with his book about birds and read a page out loud. His voice kept breaking. I let them all stay. I did not know what to do with so much kindness, so I took a little at a time.

Evelisse sat behind me on the bed and brushed my hair. She hummed a soft tune, and then she stopped.

"There is something I want to give you," she said. "You don't have to take it."

She held out a small white box. Inside, on a piece of faded silk, was a tiny gold bracelet. It was so small that it would only fit a baby. On the front, in thin, neat letters, was a name.

Elodie.

"That was your name," Evelisse said. Her hands were shaking. "Your father and I chose it months before you were born. I bought this bracelet myself. I wanted to put it on your wrist the first night, but you were so small, and the doctor said to wait until morning." She pressed her lips together. "I kept it in my bag. I have kept it for twenty-nine years."

I looked at the bracelet for a long time. The sisters at the orphanage had given me my name. They told me they chose it from a book. I had carried it for twenty-nine years, and it had never belonged to anyone but me.

"Elodie," I said quietly.

It did not feel like mine. But Evelisse closed her eyes when she heard me say it, as if she had been waiting a very long time.

"You don't have to use it," she said. "I only wanted you to know that you were named. Before anything happened, before everything went wrong, you were wanted, and you had a name."

I did not take the bracelet. I could not. But I put my hand over hers, on top of the box, and she let me.

At two in the morning, I woke up thirsty. Ronan's chair was empty. There was a line of light under the door, and I could hear two men talking quietly. I got out of bed and held onto the wall until I reached the door.

"She asked me why it took so long," Alistair said. He sounded older than he did in the daytime. "Twenty-nine years. What do I tell her? That I did not look hard enough?"

"You looked harder than anyone," Darius said.

"It doesn't feel like that tonight."

"Then let me remind you. In the first year, you hired four agencies. One of them worked for a government. You had every hospital in the country checked, and then every orphanage. By the fifth year, we were searching in six countries. Mother flew to a town in Portugal because a girl in a photo had her eyes. She sat in a café for an hour, waiting, and then she found out it was not her. I was fourteen. I remember when she came home."

"Darius."

"I'm not finished. We offered a reward so big that the police asked us to stop saying the number. We paid investigators who lied to us, and then we paid better ones. We followed three thousand leads, and none of them was her. You stopped the active search eleven years ago because there was nothing left to try. But you kept her file open on your desk."

I pressed my forehead against the door. Eleven years ago, I was eighteen. I packed everything I owned into one canvas bag, because the orphanage could not keep me any longer. I walked out of the gate and rented a small room above a laundry shop. I paid for it with money I had saved from scrubbing floors. Nobody came to say goodbye. Nobody called to ask if I was managing. For eleven years, I had no one.

And all that time, a man had kept my file open on his desk.

I got back into bed before the door opened. Ronan's footsteps crossed the room and stopped next to me. He pulled the blanket up to my chin, very carefully, the way you would for a child. I kept my eyes closed.

For twenty-nine years, I believed I had no family. I built my whole life on that belief. I learned to need nothing from anyone. When I married Rhett, I thought that was what love cost. You gave and gave, and you never asked for anything back.

Now I had a mother who hummed to me in the evenings and kept a tiny bracelet for twenty-nine years. I had a father who read me bird books. I had three brothers who guarded my door as if I was worth guarding. I did not know how to hold any of it.

Elodie, I thought. Can I still love them? After all this time? After I learned to live without them?