Sloane nodded.
Before Tory could reply, my phone rang in my bag. I considered ignoring it or declining the call again, but what was the point? Now that we’d been pulled off the case, there was nothing left to distract me. Nowhere else to run.
“Hello.” I turned away from the group as I answered.
“Cassie.”
My father had a way of saying my name, like it was a word in a foreign language, one he could get by in, but would never fluently speak.
“They got the test results back.” I said it so that he wouldn’t have to. “The blood they found. It’s hers, isn’t it?” He didn’t reply. “The body they found,” I pressed on. “It’s her.”
On the other end of the phone line, I heard a sharp intake of breath. I heard him jaggedly let it out.
While I waited for my father to find his voice and tell me what I already knew, I walked toward the exit. I stepped out into the sunshine and a light January chill. There was a fountain out front—massive and the color of onyx. I came to stand at the edge of it and looked down. My reflection flickered over the surface, dark and shadowed.
“It’s her.”
I realized, when my father said the words, that he was crying. For a woman you barely knew? I wondered. Or for the daughter you don’t know any better?
“Nonna wants you to come home,” my father said. “I can get an extended leave. We’ll take care of the funeral, bury her here—”
“No,” I said. I heard the pitter-patter of small feet as a child ran up to the fountain next to me. A little girl—the same one I’d seen that day at the candy shop. Today she was wearing a purple dress and had a white origami flower tucked behind one ear.
“No,” I said again, the word ripping its way out of my throat. “I’ll take care of it. She’s my mother.”
Mine. The necklace and the shroud she’d been wrapped in and the blood-spattered walls, the memories, the good and the bad—this was my tragedy, the great unanswered question of my life.
My mother and I had never had a home, never stayed anywhere very long. But I thought she’d like being laid to rest near me.
My father didn’t argue with me. He never did. I hung up the phone. Beside me, the little girl solemnly considered the penny in her hand. Her bright hair caught in the sun.
“Are you making a wish?” I asked.
She stared at me for a moment. “I don’t believe in wishes.”
“Laurel!” A woman in her mid-twenties appeared at the little girl’s side. She had strawberry blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. She eyed me warily, then pulled her daughter close. “Did you make your wish?” she asked.
I didn’t hear the girl’s reply. I stopped hearing anything, stopped registering any sound other than the running water in the fountain.
My mother was dead. For five years, she’d been dead. I was supposed to feel something. I was supposed to mourn her and grieve and move on.
“Hey.” Dean came up beside me. He wove his hand into mine. Michael took one look at my face and put a hand on my shoulder.
He hadn’t touched me—not once—since I’d chosen Dean.
“You’re crying.” Sloane stopped short in front of us. “Don’t cry, Cassie.”
I’m not. My face was wet, but I didn’t feel like I was crying. I didn’t feel anything.
“You’re an ugly crier,” Lia said. She brushed my hair lightly out of my face. “Hideous.”
I let out a choked laugh.
My mother’s dead. She’s dust, and she’s bones, and the person who took her away from me buried her. He buried her in her best color.
He took that away from me, too.
I let myself be bundled away. I let myself retreat into Dean and Michael, Lia and Sloane. But as the valets pulled our cars around, I couldn’t help glancing back over my shoulder.
At the little red-haired girl and her mother. At the man who joined them and tossed his own coin into the fountain before lifting the girl onto his shoulders once more.
The private airstrip was clear, but for the jet. It sat on the runway, ready to spirit us to safety. This isn’t over. It isn’t done. The objection was just a whisper in my head this time, drowned out by a dull roar in my ears and the numbness that had settled over my whole body.
The agony of not knowing what had happened to my mother—of never being able to silence that last sliver of maybe—had been with me so long, it felt like a flesh-and-blood part of me. And now, that part of me was gone. Now, I knew. Not just in my gut. Not just as a matter of deduction.
I knew.
I felt hollow, empty inside where the uncertainty had been. She loved me more than anything. I tried to summon up the memory of her arms around me, what she smelled like. But all I could think was that one day, Lorelai Hobbes had been my mother and a mentalist and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and the next, she was just a body.
And now, just bones.