Chapter 3 - The Cold Truth of the Registry
The next three days were a strange, slow dance.
I didn't leave the estate. I didn't want to admit it to myself, but the quiet of the house was a relief after months of sprinting between shifts and worrying about rent. My roommate, Sloan, had sent me a text on the second day: “Some guy in a suit dropped off a check for my half of the rent and told me you were doing 'specialist childcare.' If you’re being held hostage, text me a picture of a potato. If you’re fine, can I keep your blue sweater?”
I sent her a picture of the sweater and told her I was fine.
I spent my hours with Lily. I moved her toys out of the formal nursery and into the smaller, sunnier guest room down the hall. We built forts out of pillows, colored on large sheets of butcher paper on the floor, and read books about frogs and small red trucks.
She didn't speak again. Not "Mama," not anything else. But she didn't need to. We had our own language of small nods, pointed fingers, and the quiet, dry click of wooden blocks.
Damon was rarely there during the day. He would leave before dawn, the low rumble of the Suburbans signaling his departure, and return long after Lily was asleep. But on the fourth night, I found him sitting in the kitchen.
It was two in the morning. I had come down to get a glass of warm milk for Lily, who was restless from a new tooth coming in.
The kitchen was dark, save for the single blue light of the commercial refrigerator. Damon was sitting at the massive granite island, wearing a grey cashmere sweater with the sleeves pushed up, his dark hair messy. On the counter in front of him sat a glass of amber liquid and a thick, yellowed manila folder.
He didn't look up when I entered, but he knew it was me. "She's awake?" he asked.
"She's teething," I said, walking to the stove and taking a small copper pot from the rack. "I'm making her some chamomile tea. The milk was a bad idea; it makes the mucus thicker."
"You know a lot about children," Damon said.
"I've spent five years studying them," I replied, pouring water into the pot. "And three years working in a daycare in Elmhurst before I moved to the city. Children are easy, Damon. It's the adults who are complicated."
"They are," he agreed. He took a sip of his drink, his eyes fixed on the yellow folder. "My wife, Claire, was a complicated woman. She liked things that were difficult. She liked men who were dangerous. She thought it was a game."
"And you?"
"I knew it wasn't a game," Damon said, his voice dropping into that quiet, heavy register that made the room feel small. "But I let her believe it was. Until the car went off the road on Lake Shore Drive."
He turned the folder toward me. "The police report said she lost control on the black ice. They said she was alone."
I walked over to the island, the copper pot in my hand. "But she wasn't alone. Lily was with her."
"Lily was in the back," Damon said. "But there was someone else in the front. The passenger airbag had deployed, but there was no one in the seat when the first responders arrived. Someone got out of that car before the police got there. Someone left my daughter in the cold with her mother's body."
He looked up at me, his storm-gray eyes reflecting the blue light of the kitchen. "I've spent six months looking for that person. I've searched every hospital record, every clinic, every private doctor from here to Milwaukee. Whoever it was, they were injured. The blood on the airbag wasn't Claire's."
"And you think they're still in the city?"
"I know they are," Damon said. "And I know they're close. The only way to get out of that car and vanish that quickly is if you have help. The kind of help you can buy with my name."
He closed the folder with a sharp, dry snap. "But Lily saw them. She sat there for three hours, Natalie. She saw who was in that seat. She saw who walked away."
My heart felt cold. I looked at the folder, then at the man sitting before me. He was a monster to some, a protector to others, but right now, he was just a father who was willing to burn the city to the ground to find the person who had left his child in the dark.
"She's two, Damon," I whispered. "Even if she saw them, she doesn't have the words to tell you."
"She has you," Damon said, standing up. He was taller than I remembered, his presence filling the dark kitchen like a shadow. "She called you 'Mama.' She hasn't called anyone that since the accident. Not even Claire's sister, who has been trying to move into this house since the funeral."
May you like
He stepped closer, his hand reaching out to touch the collar of my shirt, his fingers brushing the fabric where Lily had held me. "You are the key, Natalie. Whether you want to be or not."
He walked out of the kitchen, leaving me alone with the quiet hiss of the copper pot on the stove and the heavy, sweet scent of chamomile filling the air.
