Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Juliet’s pov

I had practiced the first sentence so many times that the words no longer sounded real.

“Hello, Dylan, my name is Juliet.”

That was wrong, because I was not a stranger to him, I was his mother.

“Dylan, I am your mother.”I said again.

That was worse, because he was five years old and he would not know what to do with it.

I tried again under my breath as I walked, and then I stopped on the pavement outside a bakery with my hand pressed flat against my stomach, because my nerves had made me nauseous and my legs were not working properly.

Today was the day.

It was five years to the exact day since I had walked out of Casa Serena with my arms empty, and I had not spoken a single word on the whole ride home.

The blue wool coat I wore was not really mine.

Scarlett had sent it a month earlier in a box from California with a note that said, “For the biggest day of your life, you deserve to look like it.”

This morning she called me on video while I was getting dressed and said, “Wear the blue one, Jules, he will remember his mother in blue.”

So I wore it, and the folded copy of the care contract was in the inside pocket, and in my bag was a small red toy car that I had bought at a market for four euros and wrapped in paper I had drawn stars on.

It was not much, but it was all I had been able to give him for five years apart from my promise.

I started walking again, and my mind went where it always went when I was afraid, back to the beginning.

I was twenty one when my father married me to Aiden.

It was a business arrangement and everyone knew it, and Aiden left the country a week after the wedding for almost a year, so I lived in his family’s house in California and did as I was told.

Then one evening Scarlett, my best friend since school, dragged me out of that house to a hotel bar to cheer me up.

I remembered the bar clearly, and the one drink I ordered because I did not like to drink, and after the first few sips I remembered nothing at all.

I woke the next morning in my own bed with a pounding headache and a gap in my memory that I could not explain, and Scarlett told me on the phone that I had left early and gone home, that I had been tired, that it was nothing.

I believed her.

Two months later I was sitting on the edge of a bathtub staring at a test with two lines, and I did not understand how it was possible, because Aiden had not touched me since the wedding night and had not even been in the country.

His mother noticed my sickness first and called him, and Aiden flew home three days later and stood in the bedroom doorway and called me every ugly word he could think of.

I told him again and again that I had no idea how it had happened, and he laughed in my face and filed for divorce within the week.

My father disowned me the same afternoon, because a scandal would have broken the merger he had sold me for, and he only said that he no longer had a daughter.

Everyone left.

Only my little sister Sophie and Scarlett stayed, and it was Scarlett who found me the cheap flight to Italy and a room in a house that was rented to women with nowhere else to go.

Dylan was born in a public hospital in the middle of the night, with only a midwife beside me.

I held him for one single day.

He had a full head of dark curls and a small crescent shaped mark on the back of his left calf that I kissed over and over, and when I touched his palm his tiny hand closed around my finger and held on.

Then I signed the care contract at Casa Serena, because no one would hire a woman with a newborn, no papers, and no family.

He would be cared for there for five years, I was not allowed to visit or contact him before the agreed date, and on the fifth anniversary I would come back and take him home.

I walked out of that yellow building with my arms empty, and I understood that I would have to become strong, because nobody else was going to do it for me.

For five years I did.

I cleaned offices at four in the morning, washed dishes at lunch, and waited tables at night, and I saved every coin in a biscuit tin, and last month I rented a real room with a window and a door that locked, ready for two people.

Sophie had stopped answering my calls after the first year, and when I cried to Scarlett about it, Scarlett said gently that Sophie had asked to be left alone and that it was not about me, that it was about our father.

That still hurt.

It hurt on days like this one, when I wanted my sister beside me more than anything.

I touched the bracelet on my wrist.

It was thin silver with a small crescent moon engraved on the inside, a gift from my mother on my sixteenth birthday, one of a pair, and I had lost the other one in California the year I got pregnant.

I turned it once on my wrist, the way I always did for luck, and turned the corner.

Casa Serena was two streets away.

I could see the top of the yellow wall.

My heart began to hammer, and I thought, in five minutes I will be holding him.

“Mom!”

A small body slammed into my legs, and two little arms wrapped around my knee.

I gasped and nearly dropped my bag.

A little girl of about six, with dark braids and wet cheeks, was clinging to me, and she was wearing a blue coat exactly the same color as mine.

“Mom, I found you!”

“Sweetheart,” I said, crouching so we were level, “I think you have made a mistake, I am not your mom.”

The girl blinked at me, and her face began to crumple, and she looked down at my coat and then back up at my face, and she whispered, “But you have the same coat as Mama.”

“Where is your mama?” I asked, looking around for any adult at all.

That was when I saw the woman at the far corner of the street.

She wore the same blue coat as mine and had a scarf pulled over her hair, and she was standing very still with her face half turned, and when I looked directly at her, she stepped quickly behind a delivery van and was gone.

It was strange, and my skin went cold, but there was no time to think about it, because the little girl’s stuffed rabbit slipped from her arm and bounced across the pavement into the road.

“Bunny!”

The girl tore her hand out of mine and ran after it.

I turned and saw the black car coming.

It was coming fast, too fast for that narrow street, and the driver was turned halfway toward the back seat, answering someone.

“No!”

I did not think.

I dropped my bag and ran into the road and grabbed the little girl around the waist and threw her toward the pavement with every bit of strength I had.

The bumper hit my hip, and then my whole body left the ground.

I felt the asphalt strike my shoulder, then my head, and the sound of the horn and the brakes and a woman screaming somewhere far away became faint and distant.

My bag lay open a few steps from my face, and the red toy car had rolled out of its star covered paper and stopped against the curb.

I thought, Dylan, and I could not move my hand to reach it.

A man in a dark suit was kneeling beside me, and I did not know when he had climbed out of the back of the car.

His face was very close and very pale, with sharp features and eyes a bright blue that I could still see clearly while everything else blurred, and he was looking straight into my eyes.

His voice was low and shaking.

“Alice.”

Alice?

I tried to ask who he was talking to.

Why was he looking directly at me while he said another woman’s name?

My mouth would not make the words, and the edges of my vision were growing dark, and the last thing I saw was his face above me, saying it again.