Chapter 4

On the other end of the line, my... on the other end of the line, Rosalind Rourke Ainsley took a breath and became someone else.

"Augustin." Warm now. Concerned. "Where are you? I've been trying your cell all afternoon. Is something wrong?"

"Something is wrong," he said.

"The carousel? Preston called me about some unpleasantness with an employee, he was-"

"Preston called you nine minutes ago and told you she found it."

Silence. Two seconds. Three.

"I don't know what that means," she said.

"I know you don't," Augustin said, and hung up.

He stood there with his hand still on the phone, and I watched an old man's face do something I've only seen once before, on my mother's, in the last week of her life: the look of somebody taking inventory of everything they believed and finding it wasn't true.

"Who," I said, "is Rosalind?"

"My sister. Fifteen years younger. She's chaired the family foundation since nineteen eighty-nine." He let go of the phone. "She's sixty-nine. She has three grandchildren. She sends me a ham every Easter."

I almost laughed. It came out wrong.

There was a knock on the office door. Not Preston. A woman in a gray suit with a leather folder, sixtyish, short gray hair, no jewelry except a wedding band. Augustin's driver had gone to the car and come back with her and a box.

"Nadia Fenn," Augustin said. "My attorney of twenty-two years."

"I came for the gates," Nadia said, "but I brought this instead." She set a cardboard box on the desk. It looked like something pulled out of a basement: dented corners, a strip of masking tape on the lid with a date written in ballpoint. OCT 1989.

"Your wife packed it," Nadia said to Augustin. "You told the housekeeper to box the nursery. It's been in the storage room at the bluff house ever since."

Augustin stared at it like it might bite.

"I don't want-"

"She has a right to it," Nadia said, and looked at me.

He opened the box.

Inside was a baby book with a cracked vinyl cover. A knitted bootie with no mate. A rattle. A brown envelope of photographs, most of them the orange color old film goes, and a thin file folder that had been rubber-banded shut for so long the band had left a groove.

Augustin opened the baby book first. Vivienne Rourke had written in small, even script, the handwriting of a woman who had been taught that everything worth having was worth documenting.

Height at two years. First word - "up." Teeth.

And then, halfway down a page near the back:

Oct. 3 - fell on the terrace steps chasing the dog. Small cut under the chin, four stitches, Dr. Amory. She was very brave and made him give her a sticker.

I touched my chin.

There's a scar under there. Half an inch wide. I've had it my whole life. My mother used to joke that I came out of the womb with it. When I was eleven and asked her where it came from, she told me I fell off a swing in a park in Tucson and didn't take me to a doctor because we couldn't afford one. I remember that answer so clearly because it never fit. I never had a swing set.

"Let me see," Augustin said.

"No."

"Please."

I turned my head and lifted my chin. I felt his eyes on the little pale line under my jaw for a long moment. I heard him breathe out.

Then I picked up the file folder. Inside was household paperwork. An insurance policy. A sheet of letterhead from the Rourke Maritime Foundation, listing the staff assigned to the bluff house for the year. Under the nanny listing, one line:

E. Velasco - nursery attendant, live-in. Hired on the recommendation of R. Rourke Ainsley.

And pinned behind it, a photograph.

Thirty-five years old, creased down the middle. A younger Augustin in a garden. A little girl on his hip. And beside him, holding the girl's hand, a woman in her late twenties - brown skin, dark hair pulled back, a wide uncertain smile I would know anywhere, in any decade.

My mother.

I had to sit down on the office floor. Sophie crawled into my lap without being asked. I put my face in her hair and held on.

"The woman who hired my mother," I said, "was your sister."