"I want the truth, Theodore," Catherine said to the window.
"You have it," he said. "You buried it twenty-three years ago."
Catherine turned to look at him then, really look at him, and what she saw in the set of his jaw, in the stillness of his hands, told her everything she needed to know.
The war had already begun.
Chapter 4: Twenty-Three Years
Catherine did not take off her coat when she stepped into the penthouse. The city glittered beyond the glass, and for a moment she stood in the dark entryway listening to Theodore pour himself a drink he had not offered to share.
"Well," he said. "That was quite a performance."
She turned the lock behind her. "Was it?"
"At lunch, in front of a room full of people." He swirled the whiskey. "You fell apart over a birthmark."
"It was a heart, exactly the size of a thumbnail, on her inner left wrist."
"Grief plays tricks. Twenty-three years of it."
She crossed to the counter and set her handbag down carefully. "I saw your face when I asked about the records."
"I have no idea what you mean."
"Did you change the records?" She watched him. "One flicker, Theodore. That was all. I have been your wife for thirty-one years. I know every face you own."
He laughed, a short clean sound. "You are tired. Sit down."
"Do not tell me to sit down."
Far below, a taxi horn sounded, faint as a memory, and suddenly she was not in the penthouse at all.
Saint Anne's had smelled of antiseptic and rain. She had pushed for nine hours, and then the nurse lifted the baby, slick and furious, and laid her on Catherine's chest. A girl. The nurse wiped one tiny fist, and there it was on the inner left wrist: a heart, no bigger than a thumbnail, like a signature.
"Look," Catherine had whispered, and Theodore had bent close and smiled. She remembered that smile all these years.
She had fastened the silver locket around the baby's wrist, the chain looped twice, so her daughter would carry something of hers into the nursery. A nurse took a photograph for the chart, and Catherine begged a copy, and the nurse slipped the small square into the locket beside the engraving: two hearts, one locket.
Then the alarms, and smoke threading under the door. A nurse scooping the baby from the bassinet, murmuring it was nothing, an electrical fault in the nursery wing, small and contained. Hours of waiting in a corridor smelling of burnt plastic. Then the doctor, his face gray, his hands empty. Smoke inhalation. She was so small. There was nothing anyone could have done.
Theodore had held her hand and said, "She is gone, darling," and he had handled all the papers himself, because Catherine could not.
"That was twenty-three years ago," Theodore said, and the penthouse snapped back around her: the city, the whiskey. "It is time to let her rest."
"I showed a young woman a photograph at that table," Catherine said, and pressed the locket open. "Look at it."
"I have looked at it for twenty-three years."
"Look again. The wrist. The mark."
He glanced, barely. "A faded photograph of a newborn. Millions of babies are born with marks, Catherine."
"It is the same mark. The same wrist. The same heart."
"It is grief and coincidence, and you are frightening a young woman who did nothing wrong."
"Her name is Nora Fields. She was left at Saint Mary's Orphanage as a baby. Her foster mother told her so."
"Foster children invent stories. Orphanages lose paperwork." He set the glass down. "Listen to me. You have built an entire tragedy on a smudge of pigment."
"And you have built an entire evening on one flicker of your eyes."
He studied her the way he studied a bad quarter. "If you chase this, you will embarrass this family. The foundation board will hear about it. People will say you are unwell."
"People will say what you pay them to say."
"Do not be cruel."
"Do not be condescending." Her voice did not rise. It never did, and that was worse, and they both knew it. "You have managed me for thirty-one years. You married into my family's money and resented me for having it, and you have spent three decades deciding what I am allowed to feel. Not tonight."
His jaw tightened. "I am trying to protect you."
"You are trying to protect yourself."
"From what? From a ghost?"
"From questions." She closed the locket and held it in her fist until the edges bit her palm. "If that girl is who I think she is, someone lied to me about my daughter's death and falsified the records. That is not grief, Theodore. That is a crime, and I intend to find out who committed it."
Something moved behind his eyes, quick as a fish under ice. Then his face smoothed. "You are overtired. We will talk in the morning."
"There is nothing left to talk about tonight."
She walked to the bedroom and closed the door, and stood a long moment with her forehead against the cool wood, listening to the clink of the bottle and the low murmur of the television, as if the evening could simply be resumed. Her hands were shaking. She let them shake.
Then she picked up her phone.
"Susan, it is Catherine. I need you to do something quietly."
"Of course," Susan Park said. "What do you need?"
"Saint Anne's Hospital. Twenty-three years ago this spring. I want the birth records and the death records from that night, and the fire report from the nursery wing, every page. No one is to know I asked."
"Understood," Susan Park said. "I will start in the morning."