Chapter 4

Thomas opened the door before I reached it.

He looked at the paper in my hand and stepped back. I could smell the coffee he always made too strong. My graduation photograph stood on the hallway table in a frame he had repaired twice.

I had expected the house to look different.

He reached for my coat. I kept it on.

"Who was I before you named me?"

He sat down carefully, bracing one hand against the chair. His knees had been troubling him for months. I nearly asked whether he had made the appointment, then remembered why I was there.

"Clara Eleanor Cross."

He said it as though the name might break something if spoken too loudly.

My biological mother, Eleanor, had come to him while pregnant. She was married to Daniel Cross, Jonathan's younger son. Daniel had challenged the way the family controlled its trust. After the girls were born, the threats became personal.

"Girls?"

Thomas stared at his hands.

Then he corrected himself.

"The children in the household."

I marked that hesitation in my mind. I could not hold another revelation yet.

He had legally adopted me after Eleanor left. His wife had known. The woman I buried at nineteen had known something about me I had never been allowed to ask.

"Why didn't you tell me when I was grown?"

He said he was afraid I would go looking. Afraid the family would discover where I was. Afraid he would lose me.

The last answer was the first that sounded entirely his.

I laid the instruction on his coffee table.

"And you solved that by helping me marry into the same family?"

He rubbed his face. Richard had promised that Adrian was different from Victor. The introduction had been arranged as a restoration commission. Thomas had believed a recognized place beside Adrian would be safer than remaining hidden.

I remembered our first meeting: a water-damaged drawing, an architect who listened while I explained why the ink could not simply be touched up. I had carried that memory like something nobody else owned.

Thomas had been standing behind it all along.

"I didn't make you love him," he said.

"You made sure I didn't know why we met."

He accepted that without looking up.

From a cupboard he brought a tin box containing my adoption papers, an early hospital card and two photographs. The card used the name Clara. It did not make Claire disappear.

I took the box. When Thomas tried to touch my wrist, I stepped away.

"I'll call when I'm ready."

"Don't send Richard."

"Don't ask Adrian to check on me."

He followed me to the door but stayed inside it.

Outside, Adrian was beside his car. Thomas had called him before I arrived.

I stopped on the path. Adrian saw the box and began to speak, then looked at my hand. He noticed the missing ring immediately.

"Come home tonight," he said.

"We don't have to decide everything."

I wanted the old bedroom, the familiar pillow, a night before any of this had happened. Wanting it made me angry enough to open my car door.

"I'm staying somewhere else."

"Olivia will send you the contact arrangements."

His phone rang. Eleanor Cross appeared on its screen.

I held out my hand.

He hesitated. This time I did not wait for him to decide. I called the number printed inside Thomas's box from my own phone.

The ringing on Adrian's phone stopped. A woman answered mine.

"Clara?"

I could hear my own breathing against the glass of the car window.

"My name is Claire."

"Tell me who my father is."

She said Daniel's name again, then confirmed he was alive. Adrian stood a few feet away, close enough to hear, unable to manage either side of the conversation.

I gripped the steering wheel through the open door.

"Did he know where I was?"

"Yes," my mother said.

"And last month he tried to reach you."

I turned toward my husband.