Chapter 1
The nurse tucked June against my chest, and I folded the hospital blanket around her before anyone could touch her again.
My arms were shaking so badly that the blanket slipped. The nurse caught one corner, gentle but firm, and helped me pull it up over June’s bare back.
“Easy,” she murmured. “You’re both all right.”
All right. The words sounded too small for the room, where the first cries of celebration had collapsed into the hiss of oxygen and the squeak of shoes on polished tile. Melissa stood beside the bed, her joy gone white and stunned, while Ryan stared at the floor as if it had opened beneath him.
I pressed my cheek to June’s damp hair. She smelled like soap and warm skin, and her tiny mouth moved against the blanket, searching for something familiar.
“She’s not going anywhere,” I said.
Ryan flinched as if I’d struck him.
Melissa took one step toward him. “You don’t get to say that and then stand there like a stranger.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” Her voice cracked. “You held her. You looked at her. And then you handed her away.”
His hands curled at his sides. I had seen those hands build a crib, tighten bolts, sand the rails smooth so no splinter could catch on a baby’s skin. Now they were trembling.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Stop saying that.” Melissa wiped at her cheeks, smearing mascara beneath one eye. “Tell us what you saw.”
Ryan lifted his gaze to me. He looked like my brother, my twin, the person who’d sat beside me through the worst night of my life after our parents died. But fear had changed his face. It made him look younger and less certain, like the boy who used to wake me from nightmares because he couldn’t stand hearing me cry alone.
The memory made me angry.
I pulled June closer. “You’re going to explain.”
The nurse glanced between us. “Would you like me to give you a minute?”
“No,” Melissa said. “I want him to answer.”
Ryan’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked toward the doorway, where a cart rattled past in the hall, and seemed to brace himself against whatever might come through it.
“I need you both to listen,” he said.
“Then start talking,” I answered.
He swallowed. “It’s the mark.”
“I know what you’re looking at.” I kept my voice low for June, though my heartbeat had become a hard, frantic knock. “It’s a birthmark. It doesn’t change who she is.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” Melissa asked. “Because you just told me you can’t take your own daughter home.”
The word daughter hit him. His eyes squeezed shut for half a second.
I shifted the blanket enough to see June’s back. Near one shoulder blade, a wine-colored crescent curved across her pale skin, its edges soft and uneven. It was small. It was still. June gave a sleepy twitch, and the crescent moved with her.
I had recognized it before I understood what I was seeing.
The first thing that came to me was a hallway in our childhood house, sun falling across a framed family photograph. My mother sat in the center, laughing at something outside the frame. My father stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder. Ryan and I, still little, leaned into each other on the carpet.
And there, tucked in the arms of someone I couldn’t quite picture, a bare shoulder marked with a dark curve.
I blinked. The image scattered, leaving only the hospital lights and the warm weight of June.
“Have you seen this before?” Melissa asked.
“I—” My throat tightened. “I don’t know.”
Ryan’s face changed at my answer. Not relief. Recognition.
“You remember,” he said.
“I remember a picture. Maybe.” I stared at him. “Who was in it?”
“I don’t know if that’s what you saw.”
“Then tell me what you saw.”
His gaze dropped to June again. “When I was a kid, I saw the mark on someone else.”
Melissa gave a small, disbelieving laugh that held no humor. “You’re telling us you’re afraid because a baby has the same birthmark as somebody from a photograph?”
“I’m telling you I thought that person was gone.”
The nurse had quietly retreated toward the counter, though she stayed within reach. Melissa looked at Ryan as if she were trying to recognize the man who’d spent months talking to June through my belly, reading nursery books aloud and arguing over the shade of yellow for the walls.
“Gone how?” she asked.
Ryan’s face tightened. “I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know what they told us.”
“Who told us?”
He looked at me, and his silence opened a cold place in my stomach.
Our parents had left behind boxes of photographs, handwritten recipes, and stories we repeated until they became family law. There were other stories, too—the ones that vanished when Ryan or I asked the wrong question. I had been young enough to accept that a closed door meant there was nothing behind it.
I wasn’t young now. I was holding a newborn.
“Ryan,” I said. “You’re going to tell us everything you remember.”
He shook his head, but not as if he refused. As if the memory itself frightened him.
Melissa stepped between him and the bed. “Look at her.”
He did.
“Look at your daughter,” she said. “Not the past. Her.”
His eyes fixed on June’s face. She yawned, one tiny fist rising beside her cheek, and a soft sound escaped him—almost a laugh, almost a sob. He reached out, then stopped before his fingers touched the blanket.
I wanted to pull him close. I wanted to tell him we would figure it out, the way we had figured out so many things together.
Instead, I tightened my arms around June. He would have to earn the space between us back.
“Tell me,” I said.
May you like
Ryan looked at the mark, then at me.
“It belonged to someone our parents taught us never to discuss.”
