Chapter 2 - The Boy Who Stayed
I returned to the café alone an hour later. The owner had replaced the broken cup, wiped the floor, and was looking at me with a hostility I deserved.
“I'm not here to make trouble,” I said.
“You already did.”
He pointed to a booth at the back. Daniel sat beside Rosa, his jacket draped over a radiator, holding a glass of water. His hair had dried in the same stubborn wave mine made when it rained.
I stopped several feet from the table. “Can I sit?”
Daniel considered that. “For fifteen minutes.”
Rosa withdrew a hospital envelope protected by plastic sleeves. A page inside named her, listed a twin delivery, and showed two identification numbers marked A and B.
“Both boys were born early,” she said. “Both had a congenital cyst behind the left ear. The doctor removed them a few weeks later. That's the scar you share.”
She slid another paper toward us: a photograph of two very small babies lying side by side beneath blankets. I had never possessed a picture of myself as an infant. Livia said her camera had been stolen during our move.
Daniel touched the photograph with the edge of one finger. “You said this was me and a cousin.”
“I told too many lies,” Rosa replied.
My first instinct was to reject every page. Anyone could print a hospital form. Anyone could find a photograph of newborn twins. The resemblance was startling, but resemblance wasn't proof of a complicated legal history.
“Will you take a DNA test?” I asked Daniel.
“Eventually. Through a lab we choose together. Not one supplied by your security department.”
“Fair.”
He seemed surprised to hear me say it.
Rosa looked out the window. “When you were born, I cleaned offices at night. Your father had vanished before I knew there were two babies. I lived with my sister Celia in an apartment with faulty heat and a window that wouldn't shut. The hospital social worker said one of you needed continuing treatment, and a family with money was willing to help.”
“Carlo and Livia,” I said.
She nodded. “I met them twice. Livia was kind to me. Carlo spoke to the lawyer. They said temporary care, until I could work full-time and move someplace safe.”
“What did you sign?” Daniel asked.
“A consent form. And later something else. I thought I was agreeing to keep you in treatment.”
“You don't know?”
“I was twenty-nine. I understood enough English to work. Not enough legal language to argue with three people across a desk. I asked for a copy. They said they'd mail it.”
Carlo used to say, Read every contract before you sign it. I wondered whose signatures had made my childhood possible.
“When I went back,” Rosa continued, “they told me the adoption was final.”
She stopped, took a breath, and told us how she had tried to contest the papers. A clinic advised her to find a lawyer. The lawyer she consulted demanded money she didn't have. Then a man visited her workplace and warned that if she continued, social services would be told she could not care for Daniel either. She never knew whether the threat was real. Fear made it real enough.
Daniel turned to her. “And you never told me I had a brother?”
“I told myself I was protecting you.”
“You made me mourn a person who was alive.”
“I know.”
For once, nobody tried to fill the silence.
When Daniel finally spoke, his voice had steadied. “Last month I started digging through old property files for the school district. We were trying to find out why a warehouse roof near the playground had been left open. One of the names on the filings was your company. I wrote to you.”
“I never saw a letter.”
“Two letters. And an email.”
He showed me a delivery receipt. Both letters had been signed for at DeLuca Freight's corporate office. Somebody inside my building had accepted them.
“Why did you go to the credit union?” I asked.
“Because the warehouse's environmental bond was held there. I wanted to see whether a public filing existed. The clerk told me records weren't open to walk-ins. I left.”
The building in Briggs's photograph was therefore real. The story attached to it was not.
Rosa reached across the table but did not touch my hand. “Carlo wasn't the only one who knew, Enzo. Last week a lawyer called me. He offered to pay for Daniel's apartment repairs if I promised never to speak to you.”
“Name?”
“He said his name was Victor Hales.”
I felt something cold settle in my stomach.
Victor was my company's general counsel. He had been the first person to show me Daniel's photograph and call him a professional impersonator.
Daniel watched the change in my face. “You know him.”
“He's worked for my family for twenty-two years.”
“Then maybe your family knows more than you think.”
He folded the hospital photograph and pushed it across the table. Not toward me, but toward the empty space between us.
“You can photograph it,” he said. “You can't take the original.”
I took out my phone and carefully captured both sides of every document Rosa allowed me to see.
May you like
When I finished, a new email lit my screen. Victor had sent a message with the subject line SECURITY INCIDENT, followed by five words: Do not meet Daniel Mercer.
I had already met him. And for the first time, I wondered whether Victor was frightened not of what Daniel might steal, but of what the two of us might compare.
