Page 48

With a sigh I turned my focus back to the building.

My mother had lived here.

The thought landed differently now that I was standing in front of the place.

I'd never put those words together before. Not really. My mother existed in my head the way historical figures did, preserved in a handful of facts that never changed. The woman who died giving birth to me. The daughter Danika refused to discuss. A name on the family tree with two dates printed far too close together.

There had never been anything between those dates.

No life.

At least, not one I'd allowed myself to imagine.

But she had lived here.

She'd had a kitchen. She'd carried groceries through that front door and up those steps. Maybe she'd bitched about the heating bill in winter or stood at one of those second-floor windows watching the rain. She'd misplaced things, burned dinners, left dishes in the sink. Maybe she'd sat on that porch with her shoes kicked off after a long day and wondered what the hell she was doing with her life.

Ordinary things.

Stupid, meaningless, beautiful things that had never made it onto the family tree.

And suddenly, the woman I'd spent my entire life thinking of as someone who died felt dangerously close to someone who had lived.

She'd been twenty-two when she signed the lease.

Twenty-two.

Four years younger than I was now.

For some reason, that was the part that got me.

I closed my fingers around the keys and felt the metal bite into my palm.

"Okay," I said.

River didn't move, because he knew me too well. He waited.

I drew in a breath, looked once more at the second-floor windows, and started toward the porch.

"I'm ready."

Whether I was or not, I went up the steps.

The upstairs apartment smelled like damp plaster, old cooking grease, and the stale heat of a place that hadn't been properly aired out in years.

It wasn't much. Four rooms and a kitchen, all of them empty, all of them painted the same landlord white. Whoever had done the job hadn't bothered with details. Paint covered the trim, the outlets, even the hinges, sealing decades of other people beneath it one careless coat at a time.

The radiators were cold. The wood floors had disappeared beneath so many layers of varnish they shone like plastic, and when I opened the hall closet, a single wire hanger swung gently from the rod.

I watched it move until it stopped.

Twenty-six years.

That was how long it had been since my mother lived here. Twenty-six years of tenants coming and going, painting walls, replacing locks, losing security deposits, raising children, breaking up, moving out. Whatever trace of her I'd hoped to find had probably been cleaned, painted, sanded, or thrown away nine times over.

I knew that.

I searched anyway.