Nora frowned. "Twenty-three. Why?"
Theodore's chair scraped softly against the floor. "Catherine," he said, and there was warning in it. "That's enough."
Catherine ignored him. "And your family? Do you have family in the city?"
"Ma'am," Nora said, "I don't think this is the place."
"Catherine," Theodore said, louder now. He reached across the table and closed his hand over her wrist. His grip was firm. "Stop."
Catherine looked at him and saw something she had never seen in forty years of marriage: not anger, not embarrassment. Something colder. Something that looked, for a fraction of a second, like fear.
She pulled her wrist free.
Around them, the restaurant had gone quiet. The clink of cutlery had stopped at the nearby tables, the low murmur of conversation had died away, and every face within twenty feet had turned toward her.
The whole restaurant was looking at Catherine Marlowe, standing frozen at her table, staring at a waitress she had never met, shaking like a woman who had just seen a ghost.
Chapter 2: The Silver Locket
Catherine did not look away from the waitress. The restaurant had gone very quiet.
"Nora," Theodore said quietly. It was a warning shaped like her name.
She did not answer him. Her hands moved instead to the clasp of her handbag. She reached inside.
"Madam," the waitress said, her voice thinner now. "Is there something wrong with your lunch?"
"Your name is Nora Fields," Catherine said.
"Yes." Catherine's fingers found the small shape at the bottom of her bag. She drew it out and held it in her palm.
It was a silver locket, oval, its surface worn to a soft dullness, the chain tangled from years of lying folded away. Twenty-three years of being opened and closed had thinned the metal at the hinge until it was nearly transparent.
Nora stared at it. "Ma'am, I don't understand what you want."
"One moment." Catherine's voice was trembling, but the tremble did not break the precision of it. She pressed the catch with her thumbnail. The locket opened.
Inside, behind a scratched oval of glass, was a photograph faded to the color of old tea. A newborn baby wrapped in a hospital blanket, one tiny fist raised beside its cheek. And on the inside of that small wrist, dark against the pale skin, a mark shaped unmistakably like a heart.
Nora looked at the photograph. She looked at her own wrist. She looked back at the photograph. The color drained from her face.
"That is not possible," she whispered.
"Because I put it on you," Catherine said.
Nora took a half step backward. "I don't understand why you have that."
"I was told my daughter died in a nursery fire the night she was born," Catherine said. "Twenty-three years ago. They told me there was nothing left to hold. So I kept this. It was around her neck when they took her away. It is the only proof I ever had that she existed."
"Ma'am." Nora's professional calm was cracking. She glanced toward the back of the restaurant, where her manager stood watching. "I think you have mistaken me for someone else."
"The mark is on your left wrist," Catherine said. "Inner wrist. Shaped like a heart. It was there when you were an hour old. I am looking at it now."
"This is a birthmark." Nora's voice rose a notch, and she wrapped her right hand around her left wrist. "Half the girls in this city have birthmarks. It does not mean anything."
"It means everything." Catherine stood. She was not a tall woman, but she had the stillness of someone accustomed to being listened to, and the room gave her its attention. "I am not trying to frighten you. I only want to understand how you came to carry a mark I photographed twenty-three years ago."
"You are saying that baby is me."
"I am saying that baby wore this locket, and you wear her mark, and I need to know why."
Theodore rose and laid a hand on Catherine's shoulder, a husband's gesture that landed like a clamp.
"Catherine," he said. "You are upsetting the young woman. Sit down."
She looked at his hand on her shoulder. Then she looked at his face, and something in her gaze made him remove the hand.
"She has a right to be upset," Catherine said. "So do I."
Nora was retreating now, one step, then another, the photograph still open in Catherine's palm like an accusation.
"Where did you get that photo?" she demanded. Her voice had gone hard. Underneath the hardness, Catherine could hear fear, and it hurt her in a place she had kept closed for twenty-three years.
"I took the photograph myself. There was a fire alarm, and they were moving the babies, and a man was shouting in the corridor. Eleven minutes. I have counted them every year since.
"Afterward they told me she was gone," Catherine went on. "The fire took the nursery. They said there was nothing to bury. And I have carried this locket every day of it, and now I am looking at you and I do not believe a word they told me."
"Stop." The word came out of Nora rough and thin. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about me."
"I know that mark," Catherine said softly.
Nora bumped into the neighboring table. A water glass wobbled, and the man seated there caught it without looking away.
"I need to get my manager," Nora said, and her voice wavered.
"Of course," Catherine said. "But before you go, tell me. How old are you?"
Nora stared at her. "Twenty-three."
The word fell into the silence and stayed there. Catherine closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet, but her voice had not wavered once.
"Thank you," she said.
Theodore stepped forward. "That is enough. Catherine, we are leaving."