CHAPTER 6 — THE SIX YEARS THAT VANISHED

Her small room. One lamp on. Sophie asleep on the second bed, an arm flung above her head, a rabbit tucked under her chin.

Aleandro looked at the child for a heartbeat longer than he meant to. Then he looked away. He set the silk down on the little table beside the door. He did not sit.

“You have kept this,” he said. “For six years.”

Clare did not speak.

He did not tell her yet. He asked instead — only asked — a question he had spent six years wishing someone would ask him.

“What do you remember about a rainy night in an alley in Brooklyn?”

She sat down on the edge of her bed as if her legs had made the decision without her. Her voice, when it came, arrived in pieces.

“There was a man. He was — he was against the wall. There was so much blood. I thought he was already dead when I ran into him. He was not. He looked up at me.”

She stopped.

“And his eyes were blue. Really blue. Like the sea when it is about to rain. And he was — he was asking me, not with words. Just his eyes. And I could not leave him. I do not know why. I could not leave him.”

Aleandro let a long moment pass before he spoke. He said it the way a man lays down a weapon he no longer wants to hold.

“Those blue eyes are looking at you now.”

Clare’s hand went to her mouth. The paperback dropped, forgotten, onto the floor between them.

Six years arrived inside her all at once. The rain in the alley. The wet brick against her back as she knelt. The way her palms had gone slick almost immediately, and how she had pressed harder anyway, because the man beneath her hands had been trying to look at her, and something in his eyes had made her decide she was not going to let him go alone.

The sirens growing louder, then fainter as she ran. Her apron soaked through. The bus ride home.

She could not remember taking the pregnancy test. Four days later in the bathroom of Old Grove, still with brown stains on her cuffs. Positive. Four weeks.

A father whose name was on nothing.

She had held the silk in her lap on that bus and had not been able to throw it away. It had not felt like garbage. It had felt like something she had been trusted to carry.

She had been twenty-four. She had been alone. And she had understood, without anyone telling her, that a stranger dying in an alley was the kind of thing