I opened the lowest drawer of my dresser and pulled out a velvet pouch.
Inside was a silver locket I had not worn in years.
Adrian had asked about it once.
I told him it belonged to my mother.
That was all.
I ran back.
Grace had wrapped the robe around herself.
She looked frightened now.
I opened the locket.
Inside was a photograph.
Faded.
A woman in her thirties sitting on the grass with a little girl on her lap.
The woman’s hair was dark.
Her smile wide.
Her right shoulder partially visible beneath a summer dress.
And there it was.
The same crescent.
Grace leaned closer.
Her breathing changed.
I whispered:
“This is my mother.”
She looked at the photograph.
Then at me.
I could barely force out the next words.
“Her name was Eleanor Bennett.”
Grace’s face went blank.
I said it again.
“Eleanor.”
Her lips parted.
Nothing.
I touched the photograph.
“This little girl is me.”
Grace’s hands started trembling.
“I’m sorry.”
I began crying.
“No.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“I don’t know you.”
Those four words hurt more than I had expected.
Because for one impossible second, I thought recognition would happen like a movie.
Her eyes would widen.
She would scream my name.
We would collapse into each other.
Instead, she stood three feet away and looked at me with the kindness of a stranger.
I was thirty-five years old.
And suddenly ten again.
My mother had disappeared twenty-five years earlier.
Everyone believed she was dead.
There had been a fire at our old house in Bellmere.
Not long after my father died.
I had been staying with my aunt that night.
The house burned almost completely.
My mother’s car was outside.
Some of her belongings were found inside.
No body was ever definitively identified.
But after months passed, then years, the family stopped saying missing.
They said gone.
Eventually, even I said dead.
It hurt less than uncertainty.
Now she was standing in my bathroom wearing one of my robes.
Alive.
And she had no idea who I was.
I called Adrian upstairs.
He came running.
The moment he saw my face, he stopped.
“What happened?”
I held up the locket.
Then pointed at Grace’s shoulder.
Adrian closed his eyes.
That told me something.
“You suspected.”
“I wondered.”
My grief turned instantly to anger.
“You knew?”
“No.”
“You brought her here because you knew.”
“I brought her because I thought there was a possibility.”
“What possibility?”
He looked at Grace.
Then back at me.
“At Willowcrest, she rolled up her sleeve while washing dishes.”
“I saw an old scar near her wrist.”
“You once told me your mother had burned herself cooking.”
“That could happen to anybody.”
“I know.”
“Then why—”
“Her age.”
“Her approximate height.”
“The scar.”
“And one more thing.”
“What?”
“She hummed a song.”
I stopped.
Adrian continued.
“The one you play every Christmas.”
My mother used to hum an old jazz standard while cleaning.
I still played it every December without thinking about why.
