Chapter 2 - The Woman in the Portrait
Hannah did not remember sitting down.
One moment she was staring at the silver pendant in Rosa's hand, and the next she was in a leather chair with Dominic standing across from her like a man bracing for an explosion.
"Give it to me."
Rosa looked at Dominic.
Dominic nodded.
The older woman crossed the room and placed the pendant in Hannah's palm.
It was scratched along one edge and darker than Hannah remembered, but the shape was unmistakable.
A small oval.
A tiny hinge.
Two letters inside.
H.M.
Hannah rubbed her thumb over them.
"I had one exactly like this."
Dominic's eyes fixed on her.
"Exactly?"
"My father gave it to me when I was six."
"What happened to it?"
"I lost it at summer camp when I was sixteen."
Rosa sank slowly into a chair.
"Elena said she'd had hers since she was a baby."
Hannah looked at her.
"Did she ever say where it came from?"
"No."
"Did she ever mention the name Mercer?"
Rosa hesitated too long.
Dominic noticed.
"Rosa."
The older woman closed her eyes.
"Once."
Hannah's heart pounded.
"When?"
"A few weeks before the accident."
Dominic stepped closer.
"You never told me this."
Pain moved across Rosa's face.
"She made me promise."
"She's dead."
Rosa flinched.
Dominic's voice became quieter.
"And my daughters just called a stranger Mama, so I think the promise has expired."
Rosa looked at Hannah.
"Elena found an old newspaper clipping in a box that belonged to her adoptive mother."
Hannah's fingers tightened around the pendant.
"What kind of clipping?"
"A birth announcement from a hospital in Brooklyn."
Dominic frowned.
"Whose birth?"
"Twin girls."
No one spoke.
Rosa continued reluctantly.
"The parents were listed as Thomas Mercer and Catherine Mercer."
Hannah felt as if someone had struck her in the chest.
"Thomas was my father."
Rosa nodded.
"Elena knew that."
Hannah stood so fast the chair scraped the floor.
"How?"
"She had been searching."
"Searching for me?"
"I think so."
"Why didn't she come to me?"
Rosa's eyes filled with tears.
"She said she needed proof first."
Dominic stared at Rosa.
"What proof?"
"She never told me."
"What else did she tell you?"
"Only that she thought her life before the Rossis was a lie."
Dominic's jaw flexed.
"And then she died."
The words landed like a verdict.
Hannah looked at the photograph again.
The woman suddenly seemed less like a stranger and more like a stolen possibility.
A sister she might have had.
A twin she had never known existed.
A woman who had apparently died while trying to find her.
"I need to go to my apartment."
Dominic shook his head.
"Luca is already sending a team."
"I don't want your team touching my father's things."
"Someone else is already touching them."
"Then take me there."
"No."
Hannah slammed the pendant onto the desk.
"You do not get to keep saying that word to me."
Dominic's eyes hardened.
"When my children's safety is involved, I do."
"They're not the only people whose lives just changed."
That stopped him.
Hannah pointed at Elena's photograph.
"If she was my sister, then someone stole twenty-six years from me."
Dominic did not answer.
"And if my father knew, then he died carrying that secret."
Her voice cracked despite her effort to control it.
"So you can either take me to Queens, or I can walk out that door and start screaming until every reporter in Manhattan knows Dominic Vale has a waitress locked in his house."
Luca made a small sound that might have been disbelief.
Dominic looked almost impressed.
"You think that would work?"
"I think you'd hate the attention."
"You're right."
He turned to Luca.
"We go together."
Hannah blinked.
Luca did too.
"Dominic—"
"Two cars."
"We don't know who we're dealing with."
"Then bring people who do."
Twenty minutes later, Hannah sat in another SUV wearing clothes Rosa had found in an upstairs guest room.
The jeans were too long and the sweater was too expensive, but they were dry.
Dominic sat beside her instead of across from her this time.
The girls had remained at the townhouse under heavy guard.
Emma had screamed when Hannah left the nursery until Hannah promised, absurdly, that she was coming back.
The memory disturbed Hannah more than she wanted to admit.
"Were they always silent?"
Dominic looked at her.
"What?"
"The girls."
He watched the street through the window.
"They made sounds as babies."
"Babbling?"
"Some."
"Then it stopped?"
"After Elena died."
Hannah turned toward him.
"All three at once?"
"Within weeks."
"What did the doctors say?"
"Trauma was one possibility."
"They were six months old."
"Children remember more than adults like to believe."
Hannah thought about three babies suddenly losing their mother.
"Did they see the accident?"
Dominic's expression closed.
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"They were at home."
"With who?"
"Rosa, Sofia, and security."
"Who is Sofia?"
"Their nanny."
"The woman in the car?"
"Yes."
Hannah stared ahead.
"And you?"
Dominic's mouth tightened.
"At the hospital when they brought Elena in."
"You saw her body?"
Silence.
Hannah turned sharply.
"Dominic."
"No."
A chill moved down her spine.
"Why not?"
"The car burned."
"Then how did they identify her?"
"Dental records and a wedding ring."
Hannah stared at him.
"You never saw her?"
"No."
"And you never questioned that?"
He finally looked at her.
"I questioned everything."
The fury in his voice was quiet but absolute.
"For six months, I questioned the police, the hospital, the coroner, the towing company, every camera on the route, every employee at every business within three blocks."
Hannah said nothing.
"I tore apart half this city looking for a reason it happened."
"And?"
"There wasn't one."
Hannah looked away.
"Maybe there was."
The SUV stopped outside her building in Queens.
Blue police lights reflected off wet brick.
A ground-floor window had been shattered.
Hannah's landlord stood beneath an umbrella arguing with an officer.
Luca got out first.
Two Vale security men followed.
Dominic waited until they signaled before opening Hannah's door.
"Stay behind me."
"I have lived here four years."
"Tonight, that's not reassuring."
Her apartment door was splintered near the lock.
Inside, every drawer had been emptied.
Cushions had been sliced open.
Kitchen cabinets hung open.
Her father's old desk had been dragged away from the wall.
Hannah stopped in the doorway.
The violation hit harder than she expected.
This had been the last place where her father's coffee mug still sat beside the sink and his old wool coat remained in the closet because she had not been able to give it away.
Now someone had turned the apartment inside out.
"What were they looking for?"
Dominic asked.
"I don't know."
Hannah stepped over broken glass and hurried toward the bedroom.
The closet door had been ripped from one hinge.
A cardboard archive box lay open on the floor.
Empty.
Hannah stared at it.
"No."
Dominic came up behind her.
"What was there?"
"My father's papers."
"All of them?"
"Tax files, hospital bills, old letters, photos, everything."
"Anything unusual?"
"I never went through all of it."
"Why?"
Hannah swallowed.
"Because every time I opened the box, I smelled his apartment at hospice."
Dominic's expression softened for half a second.
Then Luca called from the living room.
"We found something."
A small black device was taped beneath Hannah's kitchen table.
Luca wore gloves as he examined it.
"Microphone."
Hannah felt sick.
"How long has that been there?"
"Could be weeks."
Dominic's face went cold.
"Check the whole place."
One of the men moved toward the bedroom.
Another began examining outlets.
Hannah backed against the counter.
"Someone has been listening to me."
"Looks that way."
"Why?"
Dominic did not answer.
Her phone rang.
She nearly dropped it.
Unknown number.
Dominic held out his hand.
"Don't answer."
Hannah ignored him and accepted the call.
"Hello?"
For three seconds, there was only breathing.
Then a man's voice said, "Your father should have burned the box."
Hannah froze.
Dominic saw her face and reached for the phone.
She put it on speaker.
"Who is this?"
The caller laughed softly.
"You look even more like her than I expected."
Dominic's eyes became lethal.
"Who are you?"
The breathing stopped.
"Dominic Vale."
The caller sounded almost pleased.
"You were never supposed to meet the other one."
Dominic stepped closer to the phone.
"Where is Elena?"
Silence.
Then the caller said, "Ask your uncle."
The line went dead.
Hannah stared at Dominic.
"What uncle?"
Dominic did not move.
Luca swore under his breath.
Hannah's pulse began pounding again.
"Dominic."
He looked at her, and for the first time since Bellafonte, she saw something close to shock in his face.
"Matteo Vale."
"Who is he?"
"My father's younger brother."
"And why would someone tell us to ask him about Elena?"
Dominic's voice was flat.
"That's what I'm going to find out."
Luca's phone rang.
He answered, listened, and slowly turned toward Dominic.
"The lab rushed the DNA test."
Hannah gripped the counter.
"Already?"
"We paid for already."
Dominic ignored the remark.
"What did they find?"
Luca looked at Hannah.
"She's not the girls' mother."
Hannah exhaled so hard her shoulders dropped.
Then Luca continued.
"But the lab says she is almost certainly their mother's identical twin sister."
No one spoke.
Hannah looked at Elena's pendant in her hand.
Twenty-six years of her life split open in a single sentence.
Then Luca added the part that made Dominic's expression turn murderous.
"And someone called the lab ten minutes before the results were ready and tried to have Hannah's sample destroyed."
The police officer at Hannah's apartment tried twice to convince Dominic's security team to leave the scene.
Luca responded by producing property-owner authorization from the landlord and enough legal paperwork to make the officer visibly regret the argument.
Hannah noticed Dominic never flashed money or threatened the man.
He simply stood behind Luca and allowed his reputation to do the work.
That unsettled her in a different way.
While Luca searched the kitchen for listening devices, Hannah entered her bedroom alone.
The mattress had been lifted.
Her nightstand drawers lay overturned.
A framed photograph of Thomas holding six-year-old Hannah at Coney Island had been smashed.
She knelt and picked up the broken frame.
A small triangle of glass cut her finger.
Dominic appeared in the doorway.
"You're bleeding."
"It's nothing."
He handed her a handkerchief.
She almost refused it out of principle.
Then she took it.
"Did Elena know her adoptive parents weren't biological?"
"Not until the year before we married."
"Did that bother her?"
"It bothered her that everyone else seemed to know before she did."
Hannah looked at the destroyed room.
"I understand that."
Dominic leaned against the door frame.
"She became obsessed with old records after Maria died."
"What kind of records?"
"Adoption papers, hospital documents, anything with signatures."
"Did she ever show you Thomas's name?"
"No."
"Then maybe she was protecting me."
"From what?"
Hannah looked toward the hidden microphone Luca had found.
"From whoever was listening."
Dominic followed her gaze.
For the first time, Hannah saw him consider that Elena's secrecy might not have been distrust.
May you like
It might have been strategy.
That possibility seemed to frighten him because it meant his wife had understood a danger he had never seen.
