“You know about trapped, don’t you?” He stared down into her small, heart-shaped face. As much as he wanted to look away—needed to look away—he couldn’t. She made him remember too many moments that had passed. The surprising thing was, they were good memories, some of them. From a time when he’d been able to stand still … a time when holding a child had made him laugh instead of cry.
“Read Girl?” She pointed to a book on the coffee table. It was already open to a page.
He picked it up.
She immediately resettled herself so that she was positioned closely beside him.
He looped one arm around her and opened the book between them.
She pointed to the top of the page, very certain where she’d left off.
He began to read: “ ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the skin horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’ ”
Read to me, Daddy.
He felt Alice’s hand on his cheek, comforting him. Only then did he realize that he was crying.
“Ouch,” she said.
He looked down at her, trying to remember the last time he’d let himself cry.
“All better?”
He tried to smile. “All better.”
Smiling at that, she snuggled up against him. He closed the book and started telling her another story, one he’d spent a long time trying to forget, but some words stayed with you. It felt good, saying it all to someone, even if, by the time he got to the sad part, the part that made him want to cry again, she was fast asleep.
TWENTY-TWO
“The DNA is conclusive?” Julia asked. In the quiet of the car her voice sounded louder than she would have liked. Because of the snow and the falling night, it felt as if they were cocooned in some strange spaceship.
“I’m no expert,” Ellie said, “but the lab report indicated certainty. And he knew about the birthmark. I have a call into the FBI. We’ll know more in the morning. But …”
“What’s her real name?”
“Brittany.”
“Brittany.” Julia tested out the name, trying to make a match in her mind. She thought that if she focused on little things like that—tasks—she wouldn’t think of the big things. Alice—Brittany—wasn’t her daughter; she never had been. All along, the A answer had been this moment—Alice’s reunification with her real family. It didn’t matter that she had made a fatal mistake and fallen in love with the child. What mattered was Alice. That was the ledge Julia clung to. “Why did it take him so long to get here?”
Ellie pulled into the parking slot marked CHIEF OF POLICE and parked.
Julia stared at the sign. The beam of the headlights seemed to set it aglow. At the same time, the falling snow obscured it. Everything about this night was conflicted, it seemed. “I understand you have a job to do, El. We both do. We let ourselves get too involved with her. I get it. But I’m a professional. Believe me when I tell you that I never lost sight of the risk I was taking, and I understand what’s best for Alice.”
“That’s a bunch of shit, but I know why you’re saying it.” Ellie turned to her. In the weird mixture of light and darkness, her face seemed older and full of shadows. “There’s a problem.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you know who George Azelle is?”
Julia frowned. It took her a moment to remember. “Oh, yeah. The guy who murdered his wife and baby daughter? Sure. He—”
“He’s her father.”
“No.” She shook her head. There must be some mistake. The Azelle case had been a big deal. The millionaire murderer, they’d called him, referring to the dot-com empire he’d built. A circus of media attention had followed every confusing aspect of the process. The only certainty in the whole proceeding had been his guilt. “But he was convicted. He went to prison. How—”
“I’m not the one with the answers. He is.”
Julia couldn’t seem to move.
Ellie touched her arm. “I can go in alone, tell him I couldn’t find you.”
“No.”
As Julia stepped out into the freezing night, she tried not to panic. Losing Alice to a loving family was something she would have made herself deal with. George Azelle was something else. “Not to a murderer,” she muttered more than once on the long walk across the yard and up the stairs. All the way there, she tried to remember what facts she could about the trial. Mostly, she recalled that the jury had found him guilty.
Cotton-ball snowflakes drifted lazily from the night sky, glowing in the pyramids of light from streetlamps and windows.
Inside the station it was quiet.
Julia blinked, letting her eyes adjust slowly to the light. The main room seemed larger than usual, but that was because she’d usually seen it during press conferences. Cal was at his desk, headphones on, and Peanut stood beside him. Both looked at Julia through worried eyes.
Ellie’s desk was empty. So was the chair in front of it.
“He’s in my office,” Ellie said.
“Oh.”
Ellie looked at Peanut, then at Cal. “You two stay out here.”
Peanut’s eyes filled with tears. “We don’t want to hear it.”
Cal nodded and reached for Peanut’s hand.