Chapter 8

“Let her go,” I said. “Take me.”

Elias laughed. It was a thin, breaking sound. “You? You’d love that. Martyr Vera. The mother who chooses the child over her son.”

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

The crowd had gone still. Security guards hovered, uncertain because their uniforms matched his and their radios still answered to his voice. Police were coming, but the rain had snarled traffic. I had minutes, maybe less.

I stepped closer. I let my cane fall. I raised both hands.

“You’re afraid,” I said. “You have always been afraid. When you were six, you broke my music box and hid in the linen closet for two hours. You held your wrist just like that. You held it when you lied about the neighbor’s boy. You held it when you told me you were fine after your father died.”

His hand trembled. Poppy’s eyes darted to me, then to the knife.

“You don’t know me,” he said.

“I know you are Eli,” I said. “I know you were my son. I know you are her father. And I know you cannot kill her. You abandoned her once because you were a coward. Don’t become something worse.”

“Shut up.”

“If you hurt her, there is no version of you left for me to mourn.”

He screamed at me to stop. The knife moved an inch closer. Poppy moved faster.

She twisted in his arms and sank her teeth into his hand. Hard. He yelled and dropped the knife. I lunged for Poppy, pulling her against me. Elias reached for us, but two real security guards hit him from behind. A third came from the side. They took him down onto the polished floor.

The compass lay near my foot, open, the photograph staring up at the Art Deco ceiling. Nadia’s smile. Elias’s young face. The code.

Poppy buried her face in my gown. She was shaking. I held her so tight my arms ached.

“You’re safe,” I said. “You’re safe.”

Elias was on the floor, cheek against the marble, still trying to talk. “Mother. Mother, tell them. Tell them who I am.”

I looked down at him. My son. My dead son. My living son. The man who had made a grave for himself and put a child’s mother in it.

“I know who you are,” I said. “That is why I’m telling them everything.”