Chapter 1 - The Sound of Keys Hitting Marble
Victoria Haynes shoved my three-year-old daughter so hard that Lily slid across the marble beneath a piano worth more than every apartment I'd ever rented.
I heard her scream from the service hallway. By the time I reached the parlor, Lily was holding her stuffed rabbit against her chest, her little knee scraped red. Victoria stood beside the grand piano, straightening the cuffs of her cream jacket.
"She put fingerprints on it," Victoria said. "Control your child, Rosa."
I scooped Lily up. "Did you hit your head?"
She shook it, crying. "I just wanted the music, Mommy."
"She was told to stay in the kitchen," Victoria said. "Some children need a firmer lesson."
"She's three." My voice came out sharper than I'd intended. "And you don't touch her. Ever."
"You're forgetting who signs your checks."
"No," a man said from the doorway. "She's not."
Ethan Caldwell stood with his briefcase in one hand. His keys dropped from the other and rang against the floor. I knew that face better than I wanted to. Four years ago, he'd kissed me in a rainstorm outside Columbia and promised the future wasn't something he feared. Now his eyes had settled on Lily.
"Look at me, sweetheart," he said, kneeling.
Lily leaned into my neck. He waited, not reaching for her. When she finally turned, he went pale. She had his gray-green eyes, the same dark ring around the iris.
"How old?" he asked.
"Three."
Victoria laughed once. "Ethan, the maid is causing a scene."
He stood. "Call Grace. I want a doctor here. Then leave this room."
"Excuse me?"
"Now."
Victoria stalked toward the door. Ethan looked at me with something worse than surprise: recognition.
"I knew who you were when I hired you," he said. "I didn't know about Lily."
He reached into his jacket and offered a sealed envelope. My name was written across it in lettering I recognized from a letter that had ruined my life.
May you like
"I know why you disappeared, Rosa," he whispered.
And inside the envelope was a photograph taken on the night I thought someone would kill him.
