Chapter 14
Emily Carter.
A sound escaped my throat, but no words followed.
The record showed my address, my date of birth, and the name of my obstetrician.
Everything was correct.
Except the child’s name.
Grace Cross.
Not Lily Carter.
Not Lily Bennett, the surname Ryan had insisted upon before the divorce.
Grace Cross.
“Someone changed it,” I said.
Marco shook his head.
“This is not a recent alteration. The record was created the day of the birth.”
I looked at Lily.
She sat in her stroller, quietly chewing one ear of her rabbit.
My daughter.
The child I had carried.
The child whose heartbeat I had heard before I ever saw her face.
Nothing could change that.
Yet a hospital record connected her to Daniel Cross, a man who had vanished seven years before she was born.
Vincent turned the old photograph over again.
Near the bottom, beneath the handwritten message, was a faint series of numbers.
Marco compared them with the hospital record on his phone.
“They match,” he said.
“What matches?” I demanded.
“The patient identification number.”
I looked from the photograph to Lily.
The same number had been assigned to a baby photographed seven years earlier and to my daughter on the day she was born.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered.
Vincent’s voice was steady, but his face revealed the same disbelief I felt.
“No,” he said. “It means Grace Cross was never a child’s name.”
He looked at the boxes, the hidden files, and the letter addressed to me.
“It was a code.”
“For what?”
Before he could answer, Lily dropped her rabbit.
It landed near the wooden desk.
I bent to retrieve it.
As I lifted the toy, I noticed a shallow scratch beneath the desk’s edge.
A small shape had been carved into the wood.
A flower.
Beside it were two initials.
R.B.
Ryan Bennett.
My ex-husband had been in this room.
Then I saw the second set of initials.
V.M.
I turned slowly toward Vincent.
He was staring at the carving too.
“You said you had never been here,” I whispered.
“I haven’t.”
“Those are your initials.”
“Yes.”
“Then who carved them?”
Marco moved toward the desk, but Vincent stopped him.
There was something taped beneath the wooden surface.
A tiny digital recorder.
Its red light blinked once.
Then a recorded voice filled the room.
Ryan’s voice.
“If Emily found the key, she is standing beside Vincent now.”
Lily looked up at the sound of her father.
The recording continued.
“And if Vincent says he does not remember this room, believe him.”
May you like
I could barely breathe.
“Because seven years ago, someone took those memories away from him.”
