Chapter 2
I decided to take this child and disappear from the world.
Not run.
People who run are still thinking about the day they'll come back.
I was only walking to a place he could never reach for the rest of his life.
The rented flat was small.
Small enough that a single suitcase held six years.
When my phone lit up on the table, I thought it was the movers.
It was an e-invitation.
Gold lettering.
Alaric Thorne and Cordelia Vance request the honor of your presence.
The wedding had a date.
They'd even picked the day.
The very week my child was due to have a heartbeat.
She'd even timed that.
I don't know why I still dialed his number.
Maybe it was the child.
Maybe I just wanted, before I deleted him from my life for good, to give him one last chance to be a father.
Even if he didn't deserve it.
Two rings and it picked up.
It wasn't him.
"Hello?"
Cordelia.
Her voice light and slow, like soothing a child who didn't know any better.
"He's in a meeting."
"Elowen. It's you, isn't it."
I didn't make a sound.
"Whatever you want to say," she paused, "he's finished with you."
"Stop humiliating yourself."
Then the line went dead.
I stood there holding the phone, in that room small enough to hold six years.
The words, I'm pregnant, caught in my throat.
And never came out.
That was the first time Cordelia closed a door on me with her own hand.
Later I understood it wasn't the first time.
For three years she'd been closing them, one by one.
Just so softly that I thought I'd wandered off on my own.
It was raining that night.
Hard enough that the wipers swept across and the road ahead was still a blur.
I drove out of the city.
One hand never leaving my belly.
"We're going somewhere no one knows Mommy," I told her. "We'll start over."
I never saw the headlights that swung out of nowhere.
I only had time to wrench the wheel all the way to one side.
Shielding the child no one knew about yet.
Then the world flipped over.
The sound of glass.
The sound of rain pouring in.
And somewhere very, very far away, one faint heartbeat.
Hers.
Or mine.
I couldn't tell anymore.
When I opened my eyes again, it was in a blinding white.
A man was standing by the bed.
I didn't know him.
He wore a sharp, pressed suit, one cuff stained with a little blood.
My blood.
"Don't move," he said.
His voice was steady.
Steady enough that someone who'd just crawled back from death actually believed him.
Later I learned his name was Soren Ellery.
A lawyer.
He wasn't a passing good Samaritan.
He'd gone to that hospital that night to gather evidence for a case.
The company he was digging into happened to be the Thorne Group.
More precisely, the ugly holes buried under the Thorne Group's books.
So he recognized me.
Not from the gossip pages.
From the files he'd been through.
Mrs. Thorne. Elowen.
The woman who stood at the very edge of every group photo, was never formally introduced, whose name got left off again and again.
"I've seen you at a lot of events," he told me later. "Every time, you were the one left outside the circle of light."
"I always assumed you just didn't like to talk."
"That night in the ER, when I recognized you, I finally understood."
"It was that family. They spent years turning you into a person who didn't exist."
He leaned down, his voice very low.
"Your ID burned up in the car."
"There was another woman at the scene who didn't make it."
"No one knows for certain whether that was you or not."
He looked at me.
There was no pity in those eyes.
It was something else.
The thing that's there when one person truly sees another.
"Everyone's asking what you lost," he said.
"No one ever asked what you survived."
"So."
"Live, Elowen."
"Let Elowen Thorne die in that crash."
"From now on, no one will ever be able to take this child out of your hands."
I knew why he was helping me.
Not entirely because of me.
Half of it was that case in his hands, and the score he had to settle with that family.
He didn't lie to me about that.
"I'm not a hero," he said. "I just happen to hate the same people you do."
And that, of all things, was what made me trust him.
A man who calls himself a hero, I can't trust.
A man who admits he has his own reasons, that's the one I dared to walk with.
Later I learned that that same night, across the city, it was Cordelia who rushed to claim the news.
It was she who set the story for everyone. Mrs. Thorne, dead in a car crash.
It was she who blocked the hospital from any further confirmation.
She wanted me gone for good, so she could be the bride in peace.
She didn't know that with that one move, she'd sealed my empty grave for me herself.
The day of the funeral, he didn't come.
I only found out much later.
He sent a lawyer. Sent a wreath. Signed a form.
Even one last look at me was too much trouble.
He thought I was just throwing another tantrum.
He thought I'd always come back.
He didn't know that some people, once they turn around, are gone for a lifetime.
Outside the operating room, the doctor pulled down his mask.
"It was close," he said.
"But the baby made it."
It was the first time I ever cried out of being alive.
Not for myself.
For her.
The little thing that, on the worst night of my life, still chose to stay inside my body.
Late that night, in the nursery, a newborn's cry went up.
Loud.
Fierce.
Like she was picking a fight with the whole world that had wronged her.
The nurse laid that tiny, wrinkled infant in my arms.
I looked down.
She was staring at me, not blinking, straight into my eyes.
As if she'd always known that in this whole world, I was the only one who was hers.
Her eyes were like mine.
Only that stubborn glint at the bottom of them was like someone else.
I knew that stubbornness.
And I pushed it back down, to the deepest place in my heart.
I whispered in her ear, very softly.
"We're going to build something. And one day, he'll have to pay just to sit at our table."
That year, he was tying his wedding tie.
He thought I was already rotting in a grave.
He didn't know I'd given myself five years.
Five years, and I would make him carry everything he had, with his own two hands, and set it down in front of me.