Chapter 6 - EVERYTHING BREAKS
The room they were moved into had no windows.
Leah hated it immediately. She counted the exits — one — and stood with her back to the wall, which was a thing she’d started doing four days ago and hadn’t stopped.
Adrian was on the phone with someone in Italian. Celia was on the phone with someone in English and losing. Marcus had a tablet on the table with photographs on it.
“Explain the tin,” Leah said.
Adrian hung up. “Your mother kept a relocation packet in it. Not money. A packet — pre-printed documentation, an emergency identity, bank chip, three addresses. For you and Maya.”
“She kept it for eleven years.”
“No.” He looked tired. “She built it two years ago. After Gabriel started asking questions about the archive.”
Leah’s stomach dropped. “Two years.”
“Two years ago she knew she might have to run, and she prepared for it, and she told no one.”
Celia made a sound from the corner, short and unhappy.
“Somebody found it,” Adrian said. “Sometime in the last three weeks.”
“Gabriel.”
“Maybe.”
“Who else could get into Maya’s closet?”
Nobody answered that, which was an answer.
Marcus turned the tablet around.
“This is Samuel Cross.”
Leah looked.
A man in his sixties, gray at the temples, an ordinary face — the kind you’d walk past in an airport and forget before you reached your gate. Not tall. Not imposing. Nothing about him matched the shape she’d built in her head over the last four hours.
“That’s him?”
“That’s him.”
“He looks like a dentist.”
“He was a dentist,” Marcus said. “For four years in Geneva. Under a name that belonged to a man who died in 2009.”
Leah stared at the photograph and felt something she hadn’t expected — not fear. Anger. So much of it that her hands went cold.
“He was in our house.”
“We think so.”
“He had dinner with us.”
“Leah—”
“He brought Maya a stuffed rabbit.” Her voice climbed. “The one she sleeps with. He brought it to the hospital when she was born.”
The room went very quiet.
Adrian looked at Celia. Celia looked at Marcus. Nobody said the obvious thing out loud, but all three of them were doing the math: a gift given a year before he needed access, a rabbit that went everywhere the little girl went, and a tracker disc that had been hidden under a high chair and a bed and a suitcase on and off for two years.
“Search it,” Leah said.
“What?”
“The rabbit. Search it.”
Marcus was already moving.
They found it in the seam of one ear, sewn in under the fabric, the size of a grain of rice and flat as a scrap of paper. Maya slept with it against her face every night.
Leah sat down on the floor.
She didn’t cry. She sat with her back against the wall and her knees up and her arms around them, and she watched an adult in a suit thread a needle through a stuffed rabbit’s ear to put it back exactly the way it had been — because they had decided, together, in a conversation that happened over her head, that Maya would keep the rabbit.
They would remove the tracker and leave the rabbit.
Because a three-year-old whose only comfort had been sewn full of someone else’s eyes didn’t need to know it. Not yet. Not this year.
Adrian knelt down next to her.
“When I was twenty-six,” he said, “I trusted a man with my family’s name. He used it for eleven years. I found out from a newspaper.”
Leah didn’t look at him.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re going to want to do what I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I built a company that assumes everyone is lying,” Adrian said. “It worked. It also meant that when a woman with your mother’s handwriting came to me with a problem, she decided she’d rather disappear than be believed by a man like me.”
Leah looked at him then.
“You know that’s your fault.”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“It’s my fault,” he said, without hesitating. “Not all of it. But that part.”
She nodded slowly.
The door opened and a federal agent came in and asked for fifteen minutes with Adrian and Celia, and the adults left, and Leah was alone in a windowless room in Rome at four in the morning with a rabbit missing one grain of rice out of its ear and a letter in her backpack that her mother had written eleven years ago as if she already knew.
She pulled out her phone.
No messages.
Then, because she was tired, and because nobody was watching, and because there was nothing else to do, she typed three words and hit send before she could stop herself.
*are you okay*
To her mother’s number.
She put the phone face down on the table and stood up and walked to the one exit and stood in the doorway, watching the corridor, counting.
May you like
The reply came eleven minutes later.
*Who is this.*
