Chapter 3 - THE DUST OF SEVEN YEARS
Our apartment was three miles from St. Adrian’s, located on the top floor of a brick walk-up above an auto repair shop where the smell of motor oil and burnt rubber seeped through the floorboards.
I locked all three deadbolts behind us.
Lucia immediately kicked off her shoes and ran to the small linoleum kitchen, climbing onto a stool to reach the bread box. She was completely unaffected by the storm that had just ignited at the hospital.
“Mama,” she called out, swinging her legs. “Why did the man call me Sofia?”
My hand froze on the door chain.
I walked slowly into the kitchen and sat on the stool opposite her. “He was confused, baby. He had been asleep for a very long time.”
“He was nice,” Lucia offered, taking a bite of an apple. “His hand was big, but he didn't squeeze hard. He smelled like white flowers.”
White lilies. The lilies his brother Vincent sent to his room every morning like a funeral arrangement waiting for a body.
I reached out and brushed a stray brown curl from Lucia’s forehead. Seven years.
Seven years ago, my sister Sofia showed up at my apartment in the middle of a torrential storm, soaked to the bone, holding a black leather drive and bleeding from a cut along her hairline. She was three months pregnant.
“Dario didn't do this,” Sofia had sobbed that night, gripping my hands in my small living room. “It was Vincent. Vincent is cutting deals with the cartel behind Dario’s back. Dario found out, and Vincent is moving to put him in prison or in the ground. If Vincent knows I have these ledgers, he’ll kill me and the baby.”
I had bought Sofia a bus ticket to a small town in Vermont. I told her I would hide the drive and join her in three weeks.
Two days later, her bus was forced off a mountain road during an ice storm.
When the hospital called, I rushed to Vermont. Sofia lived long enough to give birth to a tiny, two-pound baby girl. Before she closed her eyes forever, she made me promise one thing: Never let Dario or Vincent know she survived long enough to have his child.
Sofia believed Dario was complicit. She believed Dario had allowed Vincent to target her.
So I forged a birth certificate. I named the baby Lucia—my daughter. I moved three cities over, took a job as a night-shift cleaner at St. Adrian’s under my maiden middle name, Clara Reyes, and built a wall of absolute obscurity around us.
Now, Dario Kane was awake.
And his first word after three weeks in a coma was the name of the ghost that haunted him.
My phone vibrated on the counter.
An unknown number.
I picked it up, my heart beating in my throat. “Hello?”
“Clara.”
It wasn't Vincent. It was Marco Bell’s low, gravelly rasp.
“Marco,” I whispered, looking toward Lucia, who was now drawing on a coloring book. “I told you—”
“Listen to me very carefully,” Marco interrupted, his voice hushed, backed by the background hum of hospital machinery. “Vincent just left the hospital. He brought two accountants and a private lawyer. Dario can barely speak, but he refused to sign the power-of-attorney documents Vincent brought.”
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“Why are you calling me, Marco?”
“Because five minutes ago, after Vincent left, Dario wrote a name on a piece of paper with a trembling hand,” Marco said, taking a sharp breath. “He didn't write Sofia. He wrote Clara Reyes.”
