Chapter 9: The First Morning
Celestine opened the door before Maren reached the top step.
She looked like she hadn't slept.
She probably hadn't.
But she stepped back and held the door open, and that was enough.
"She's been up since six," Celestine said.
"She found the photograph.
The one from my drawer.
She's been carrying it around since breakfast."
The house was a cottage on the edge of the Mercer property — not the estate itself, which was already the subject of legal proceedings, but a smaller house Celestine had moved into two days after the wedding.
She had taken Elodie and three suitcases and left a note for Dorian on the kitchen counter that his attorney had since described, in Maren's presence, as "unambiguous."
Maren stepped inside.
Elodie was sitting on the living room floor with the photograph in her lap and a collection of small plastic animals arranged in a semicircle around her.
She looked up when Maren came in.
"You came back," she said.
"I said I would."
Elodie looked at the photograph, then at Maren, then at the photograph again with the focused concentration of someone resolving an important question.
"Is that you?" she asked, holding it up.
Maren sat down on the floor beside her.
The photograph was the one from Celestine's drawer — Maren at perhaps twenty-four, holding a newborn, looking at the camera with an expression she didn't entirely recognize as her own.
She had been so young.
She had been so frightened.
"Yes," she said.
"That's me."
"You're holding a baby."
"I am."
"Is that me?"
"Yes."
Elodie studied the photograph for another long moment.
Then she set it down carefully at the edge of the semicircle of animals, as though it belonged there, as though it had always been part of the arrangement and she had simply been waiting for it to arrive.
"Okay," she said.
She picked up a small plastic elephant and held it out to Maren.
"This one is the mummy elephant," she said.
"She got lost for a while but now she's back.
Do you want to hold her?"
Maren's throat closed entirely.
She took the elephant.
"What's her name?" she managed.
Elodie thought about this with great seriousness.
"Maren," she said.
"I think her name is Maren."
From the kitchen doorway, Celestine made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost something else entirely.
She pressed her hand to her mouth and looked away toward the window, and the morning light came through the glass and fell across the floor between all three of them — the woman who had lost her daughter, the woman who had raised her, and the small girl sitting in the middle who had, in her own four-year-old way, just decided how the story ended.
Maren set the elephant down gently in the center of the semicircle.
She didn't wipe her eyes.
She didn't need to hide it.
"Tell me about the other ones," she said.
Elodie beamed and picked up a giraffe.
The morning opened up around them, unhurried and full of ordinary light, and for the first time in three years Maren Vale was exactly where she was supposed to be.
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Some things that are taken from us are taken through lies — but the truth has a way of finding the people who need it most, even years later.
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