She set it down and pushed back her left sleeve.
There it was. The heart-shaped mark on her inner wrist, small and dark against her pale skin. She had hidden it for twenty-three years without ever knowing why. She had worn long sleeves in summer. She had turned her wrist from cameras. She had never asked her mother about it, and her mother had never explained.
Iris stared at it. The mark stared back, patient as a secret kept too long, and she did not look away.
Chapter 17: The Mark
Iris woke with the mark burning.
Not truly burning. It could not burn. It was skin, a smudge of darker pigment on her inner left wrist in the shape of a heart, the size of her thumbnail. She had spent twenty-three years treating it as an accident she did not want to explain. Bracelets over it in summer. Her wrist turned inward without thought.
This morning she sat on the edge of her bed and stared at it.
Helen had always called it a birthmark, nothing more. Catherine Marlowe had called it evidence. Two days ago the woman had spread documents across Iris's coffee table and said: the same mark, on the same wrist, on your sister, on the newborn in this photograph.
Iris pressed her thumb into the mark and felt her pulse beat back through her skin. She had ignored it all her life. It had not changed. It had been waiting.
The phone rang at noon.
She knew before she answered: Catherine's number. Iris let it ring twice, then picked up.
"Hello, Iris." Catherine sounded careful. "Thank you for answering."
"You said everything you came to say."
"I know. I am calling to ask you something, and you can say no."
Iris sat on the bed. The mark faced upward on her knee. "What?"
"Your sister would like to speak with you. Not a meeting. Just a phone call. She asked me to ask."
Iris closed her eyes. "She asked, or you suggested?"
"She asked. She said I am the last person who should decide who gets to talk to whom."
Despite everything, something in Iris loosened. "She sounds like she has opinions."
"She does. You would find her familiar in ways that might alarm you."
Iris heard Catherine breathing, patient. "Does she want proof I am real and not a project?"
"I think she wants to know if your laugh sounds like hers."
Iris opened her eyes. "What?"
"Nothing. Give me ten minutes. She is finishing her shift. I will call her, join the three of us for sixty seconds, then hang up and leave you alone. Do you want the call, Iris?"
The mark looked up at her from her knee like a question.
"Yes," Iris said.
She sat holding the phone for eleven minutes. Then it rang, and there was Catherine's voice, and another voice said, "Is this on?"
"Yes," Catherine said. "Nora, this is Iris. Iris, Nora."
"Hi," Nora said.
And Iris's throat closed, because the voice was her own voice, slightly huskier, the way she sounded when she was angry. Her own voice, from a stranger, from a sister.
"Hi," Iris managed.
"I will leave you," Catherine said. "Call me when you are done, either of you."
The line clicked. The silence held two people listening hard for proof that the other was real.
"So," Nora said.
"So," Iris said, and Nora laughed, one short startled sound, and Iris laughed too, and the laughs were the same laugh, and the sameness was so absurd they both kept going until Iris was crying a little and Nora had clearly cried a little already.
"Oh no," Nora said. "I told myself I would not do that."
"I did not tell myself anything," Iris said, wiping her eyes. "I just threw things."
"What did you throw?"
"A pillow. At the door. It was not even satisfying."
Nora laughed again. "I would have thrown the locket."
"You cannot throw someone's evidence."
"I absolutely can. I have been thinking about it for two weeks."
They talked. The wariness was there, in the pauses, in Nora's careful words, but under it ran something Iris had never felt: recognition. They both finished other people's sentences and apologized for it. They both drummed their fingers when they thought, and both had been scolded for it.
"I argue with my hands," Nora said. "My foster mother used to say so."
"Mine said I conducted an invisible orchestra," Iris said. "She meant it kindly. Probably."
They laughed, and this time Iris let it settle in her chest.
"You do not have to believe it," Nora said, quieter. "The papers. The locket. At first I told Catherine she was a grieving woman inventing a daughter."