Chapter 1 - The Man in the Window
The coffee hit his face before I understood how much he looked like me.
It splashed across a brown jacket, ran down a stranger's chin, and left the whole Brooklyn café silent except for the hiss of an espresso machine.
He stood beside the front window with a folded newspaper in one hand. Dark hair. My jaw. The faint line between my eyebrows that showed whenever I was angry. Even the little indentation in his left cheek looked familiar.
I was thirty-nine years old. I had lived in New York my entire life, and until that morning I had never seen a man wearing my face.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
The man wiped coffee from his mouth. “The person you just assaulted.”
I had come to find a fraud. My security chief, Briggs, had shown me a photograph of this same man walking out of the Piermont Credit Union building two days before an unauthorized transfer was approved in my name. The camera angle had been bad, but the face unmistakable. Mine.
Now the man was looking back at me with the same bewilderment I felt, and somehow that made me angrier.
“What's your name?”
“Daniel Mercer.”
Briggs had told me Daniel worked at a public school and requested records from my company. I had treated those facts as evidence of fraud.
I had allowed those two facts to become a story. A man had stolen my appearance, stolen my money, and come to a neighborhood café to laugh about it.
“Take him outside,” I said.
Briggs and another man, Owen, gripped Daniel's arms. Daniel twisted away, nearly overturning a table. His sleeve rode up as he struggled, showing a scrape along his forearm. Then his jacket collar slipped, exposing the skin below his left ear.
“Let go of me.” he said.
I saw the scar and stopped breathing.
It was a small pale crescent just behind the ear. I had one in precisely the same place. My adoptive father used to say a surgeon had left it when I was a premature baby, but he never explained what surgery I'd had.
“Wait.”
Briggs continued toward the door. I grabbed his sleeve. “I said wait.”
Daniel's wet jacket caught on the door handle. Owen released him, and Daniel stumbled against the brick wall outside. Morning traffic moved past us as if nothing extraordinary was happening.
I pulled down my own collar. “Where did you get that?”
Daniel stared at my scar. His expression changed from outrage to confusion, then to something I did not want to name.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said.
A woman stepped between us. She had gray hair tucked into a dark shawl and carried a canvas grocery bag with both hands. I recognized her from the corner table, where she had been watching us ever since I entered.
“Enough,” she said.
“Ma'am, please move,” Briggs warned.
She didn't even glance at him. Her eyes stayed on Daniel, then moved slowly to me.
“Rosa?” Daniel whispered.
She pressed her lips together. “I should have told you long ago.”
“Told me what?”
Her gaze traveled between two identical faces. The noise of the street seemed to fall away.
“I kept one,” she whispered.
Daniel's hand dropped from his coffee-soaked collar. “Mom?”
My mother Livia had died five years earlier, and Carlo, my father, the previous winter. I'd never had reason to think my family story was incomplete.
Yet the same scar marked both our necks, and the woman in the shawl was looking at me with a grief so intimate it made me want to step backward.
“My name is Rosa Mercer,” she said. “On March seventeenth, 1987, I gave birth to two boys. I was told I would lose both unless I signed papers I didn't understand.”
I laughed once, an ugly little sound. “That's impossible.”
“That's what they wanted you to believe.”
Daniel closed his eyes. “You told me my brother died.”
“I know.” Rosa's voice broke, but she remained standing. “I said that because I was afraid somebody would come for you too.”
I turned toward Briggs. “Get the car.”
Briggs nodded, already reaching for his phone.
“Not for them,” I added. “For you. Both of you leave.”
He hesitated. For years, my employees had mistaken that hesitation for loyalty; I had mistaken obedience for trust. In the end he obeyed, and he and Owen climbed into the waiting sedan.
Daniel held his palm out toward me. “Your phone.”
“What?”
“Call somebody. A lawyer. The police. Whoever you think will make this better. But don't come near my mother again with those men.”
I could have answered with a threat. Instead I looked down at the coffee puddle drying on the pavement and realized that I had just humiliated a man who might be my brother.
“I'm sorry about the coffee,” I said.
“Then start with the people who grabbed me.”
He walked back into the café to retrieve his bag. Rosa followed, but at the door she turned.
“There's another reason I came today, Enzo. A man from your company has been looking for Daniel. He knew about the two of you before you did.”
May you like
The bell above the door rang as she went inside.
I stood beneath the awning, holding a fact I could barely understand and an even worse question: if somebody else knew about my brother, why had they arranged for me to find him like an enemy?
