The honesty hurt, but I preferred it.
I sat down because my legs suddenly felt tired.
“All this time, I thought I was hiding who I was from Elias to protect myself. But maybe Cynthia already knew.”
My father did not deny it.
“How?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“But you suspect.”
He looked at the portrait of my mother above the mantel. “I suspect Paul told someone things he should not have known.”
“Is Paul alive?”
My father did not answer.
“Dad.”
“I don’t know,” he said, and this time the uncertainty sounded real. “But six months ago, someone sent me an envelope with no return address.”
My heart began to pound.
“What was in it?”
“A photograph.”
“Of what?”
He opened the top drawer of his desk and removed a small locked box. From inside, he took an envelope, worn at the corners as if handled too many times.
He gave it to me.
My fingers trembled as I pulled out the photograph.
It showed my mother.
Not from years ago. Not from before she died.
The picture was dated eight months earlier.
It was impossible, of course. My mother had been gone five years. I had watched her illness take her piece by piece. I had stood at her funeral holding my father’s hand while rain soaked the cemetery grass.
And yet the woman in the photograph had my mother’s face.
She stood near a market stall somewhere coastal, wearing sunglasses and a cream scarf, older but unmistakable. Her head was turned slightly, as if someone had called her name.
On the back, written in black ink, were four words.
Ask Cynthia about Nora.
I looked up slowly.
My father’s face was ashen.
“Nora was your mother’s middle name,” he said.
The room seemed to tilt.
“What does Cynthia have to do with my mother?”
Before he could answer, my phone buzzed.
A message from the unknown number Brenda had used.
Don’t come tomorrow. Elias knows.
Then another message appeared.
And below it, an image loaded.
It was a photograph of Brenda’s kitchen table. On it lay a green coat, a cracked phone, and a folded hospital form.
At the top of the form was Brenda’s name.
Halfway down, under emergency contact, someone had written a name in neat blue ink.
Cynthia Mercer.
Not Cynthia Vale.
Not Cynthia Hart, the name she used as Elias’s mother.
Mercer.
My uncle’s last name.
I stared at the screen, unable to breathe.
Then the library phone rang.
My father answered it with a shaking hand.
He listened for less than five seconds before his eyes found mine.
“Ella,” he said quietly, “there’s someone at the gate asking for you.”
“Who?”
He swallowed.
“She says her name is Nora.”
END OF PART 2 – LIKE, SHARE AND COMMENT “THE
ENTIRE STORY” IF YOU WANT TO READ THE FULL STORY
