Rosa said quietly, "Okay. That's— that's actually kind of beautiful."
Maya walked to the edge of the lot and stood there with her hands in her jacket pockets, staring at the mountains, silent for a full minute. When she came back her eyes were dry and furious.
"Why didn't he tell me?"
Sal looked at her kindly and said her father had carried that secret gently for all of those years.
"Because he loved you exactly the way you were," Sal said. "He didn't want a single day of your life where you'd wonder if you were his."
---
That evening they ate enchiladas at Sal's table with his wife, then Sal made a phone call. "Lydia used to work with your mom at the clinic. She's retired. She'll talk to you."
Lydia Tran — no, Lydia Marsh — lived in a bungalow with wind chimes. She was small, sharp-eyed, and she opened the door before they knocked.
"You look like her," she said to Maya, without preamble. "Same jaw."
"Everyone's got a theory about my face lately," Maya said.
"Come in. Sit."
In the living room, Lydia folded her hands among framed photos of grandchildren and said, "Your mother was the steadiest nurse I ever worked with. Nothing rattled her. And then —" She stopped. "December 2000. After that night, she wasn't steady anymore. Her hands shook. For weeks, her hands shook when she lifted a syringe. I asked her what was wrong and she said, 'Nothing, I'm just tired.' But she wasn't tired, honey. She was scared of something she couldn't tell anyone."
"Did you ever suspect anything?" Maya asked.
"Suspect what? A night nurse with shaking hands? I thought she'd seen a patient die." Lydia's voice dropped. "She quit in February. Said she was moving to the Springs to get married. We threw her a party in the break room." She laughed dryly. "She cried the whole time. Wouldn't tell us why she was so happy and so sad at once."
Maya's throat tightened. "She never told anyone?"
"Not a soul. Whatever she carried, she carried it home." Lydia leaned forward. "Listen to me. I don't know what you think your mother did. But I knew Rebecca Carter for four years, and I will tell you this: that woman could not watch something suffer. A dying sparrow, a confused old man, anything. She intervened. That was her whole religion. Intervening."
---
On the drive back, the envelope sat in the tote bag like a lit candle. Rosa kept glancing at it.
"You know it's going to sit there until it rots, right?"
"I'm not ready," Maya said.
"For what? The truth? Maya, the truth keeps showing up at your restaurant with laminated cards. It's not going anywhere."
"For her voice." Maya stared at the highway. "Everybody keeps telling me who my mother was. Eleanor. Sal. Lydia. The minute I open that, there's one more voice in the chorus, and it's the one I can't argue with. I'm just — I'm not ready to hear her yet."
Rosa was quiet, then reached over and squeezed Maya's knee, hard.
"Okay," she said. "But she waited twenty-five years to be heard, babe. Don't make her wait forever."
That night Maya put the envelope back in the box and the box back on the closet shelf, and lay awake listening to the apartment settle. In the dark she held up her left hand and traced the crescent birthmark with one finger, the way she'd done ten thousand times as a girl — a private habit, hers.
Only it had never been meaningless. It had been a signature, and she'd been carrying someone else's signature her whole life.
Chapter 10: Diane
The letter was old enough that the paper had gone soft at the creases.
Maya found it wedged inside an envelope of her father's — a condolence card from years back, and tucked behind it, a Christmas card from 2008 in a woman's sloping hand: Becky, forgive me for staying away. You know why I can't. — D. The return address was Pueblo.
"D.," Maya said to Eleanor across the café table. "Rebecca's sister. Who Rebecca never mentioned. Ever."
Eleanor took the card and held it up to the light like evidence. "Sloping hand. Educated. And look — 'You know why I can't.'" She set it down carefully. "Your mother kept this for eighteen years, Maya. Whatever kept them apart, she never threw it away."
"Twenty-five years she raised me, and she never once said 'my sister.'" Maya's voice went flat. "I didn't even get to miss her. I didn't know she existed."
"Maybe that's why the note says what it says." Eleanor folded her napkin into a precise square. "'Ask Rebecca's sister what happened that night.' Whoever wrote it knew you wouldn't know to ask."
Maya folded the card back up. "Pueblo's two hours. Tomorrow."
"You don't want to go alone," Eleanor said.
"I wasn't planning to."
"What if she won't talk?" Maya asked.
"Then we knock anyway." "Twenty-five years, Maya. I've knocked on worse doors."
---
They drove south under a white sky. Eleanor wore sunglasses she didn't remove even under the clouds, and Maya wondered what it cost a person to hope at sixty the way Eleanor was hoping.
The address was a small stucco house on a street of stucco houses, a porch with two chairs and a wind-battered American flag. Maya knocked. Footsteps. A chain rattled.
"Who is it?" A woman's voice, wary.
Maya's mouth went dry. She'd rehearsed this in the car — My name is Maya Carter, Rebecca was my mother — and every version sounded like an accusation.
"My name is Maya Carter," she said. "Rebecca was my mother."
A long silence. Then the chain slid off, and the door opened.
The woman was fifty-eight, Maya guessed, gray hair pulled back, a face that had once looked like Rebecca's and was now hollowed by something else. Her eyes went to Maya's face, then dropped to Maya's left hand, where the crescent birthmark showed dark against her skin.
The woman went white.
"You have her hands," she whispered.
A floorboard creaked somewhere inside the house, and the porch wind chimes stirred faintly against the still afternoon air.
A beat of silence. The wind rattled the flag.
"You're Diane," Maya said.
"I—" Diane's gaze darted past them, up and down the street. "Who else knows you're here?"
"Why does that matter?" Maya said.
"Everything matters right now." Diane's hand hovered near the door. "Answer me."