Chương 3
Now he had to consider something worse.
Maybe he had been grieving someone who had been alive all along.
"Where is she now?" he asked.
Daniel hesitated.
"I don't know."
"Find her."
Elias ended the call and stayed outside the diner longer than he intended.
He had spent years convincing himself that the past could not hurt him because he had survived it.
That was the lie successful people told themselves.
Survival was not the same thing as healing.
By the time he reached his apartment, the city had become quiet.
His penthouse overlooked downtown, a place magazines described as a symbol of achievement.
Elias had stopped seeing it that way years ago.
The rooms were large enough to impress strangers and empty enough to remind him how few people actually knew him.
He walked past the art on the walls and ignored the expensive furniture he had never chosen.
The only thing he touched was the old wooden box inside his office drawer.
Inside was a photograph of him and Lena sitting on the hood of their father's first company car.
They were younger.
He looked arrogant.
She looked annoyed.
She had always hated pictures.
"You never listened when I was right," she had told him once.
He had laughed because he thought she was joking.
Now he wondered how many times she had tried to tell him something important while he was too busy being successful to hear it.
The next morning, Mara woke up in the back corner of an abandoned storage building she had been using for three weeks.
The mattress was thin.
The ceiling leaked.
The place smelled like dust and old cardboard.
It was not a home.
But it was somewhere nobody could find her.
She opened her backpack and removed the hospital bracelet.
She had not wanted Elias to see it.
Not because she was ashamed.
Because she knew what happened when people connected her to Lena Voss.
They stopped seeing Mara.
They saw a missing woman.
A scandal.
A question they wanted answered.
Nobody ever asked what it felt like to be the person carrying the question.
Her phone vibrated.
The screen showed an unknown number.
She watched it ring until it stopped.
A minute later, a message appeared.
I know who your mother was.
Mara stared at the words.
Her first reaction was anger.
Her second was fear.
Her third was the familiar instinct to disappear.
She deleted the message.
Then she opened the trash folder and stared at it again.
She hated that she needed answers.
Answers were dangerous.
Answers had taken her mother away.
At least that was what she had always believed.
The first time Mara remembered hearing Lena's name was when she was eight years old.
Her mother had been sick and sitting on the kitchen floor of their apartment, crying over a letter she refused to explain.
Mara had asked who Lena was.
Her mother had wiped her face and said, "Someone who loved me once."
Years later, when Mara was sixteen and her mother was gone, she found the same letter hidden inside a coat pocket.
She never opened it.
She had promised herself she would.
She just never found the courage.
That afternoon, Elias found Mara outside a community center where she sometimes ate lunch.
He did not approach quickly.
He stood across the street for several seconds, trying to decide what version of himself she would believe.
The billionaire.
The stranger.
The brother.
None of them felt right.
Mara noticed him anyway.
"You followed me."
"No."
"That was quick."
"I asked someone to find you."
Her expression hardened.
"That is somehow worse."
Elias accepted that.
"I need to talk to you."
"You needed to talk yesterday too."
"I know."
She looked surprised by the answer.
Most people argued when she accused them.
Elias just stood there.
That made him harder to understand.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"My name is Elias Reed."
The color changed in her face.
Not because she recognized him from television.
Because she recognized the last name.
"You should leave."
"Mara."
"No."
People walked around them on the sidewalk.
A man pushed a stroller past without noticing the tension between them.
A woman laughed into her phone near the entrance of the building.
The world continued while two people stood inside a moment that felt impossible.
"Your mother was Lena Voss," Elias said.
Mara looked away.
"You don't know anything about my mother."
"I knew her."
"Everyone says that."
The words came out sharper than she intended.
Elias saw the hurt underneath them.
"She was my sister."
Mara laughed once.
It was a small, broken sound.
"My mother didn't have a brother."
"She did."
"No."
"She did."
She shook her head.
"You don't get to show up after twenty-two years and decide who she was."
"I know."
"Do you?"
Her eyes filled, but she refused to let the tears fall.
"Because I spent my whole life wondering why she looked scared every time someone mentioned the past."
Elias had no answer.
That was the first time Mara saw something in him besides wealth.
A person who also had questions.
"She told me one thing," Mara said.
"What?"
"She said if anyone from the Reed family ever found me, I should not trust them."
The words hurt more than Elias expected.
Not because he believed Mara was lying.
Because he believed Lena had a reason.
"Did she tell you why?"
"No."
Mara stepped back.
"That's the problem with secrets."
She looked at him carefully.
"People think keeping them protects you."
A bus pulled up beside the curb.
She moved toward it.
"Elias."
He looked at her.
"If you really knew my mother, then you know she was not the kind of person who disappeared for no reason."
The bus doors opened.
She stepped inside.
Before the doors closed, she turned back.
"Find out what happened to her."
May you like
Then she was gone.
Elias remained on the sidewalk, watching the bus disappear into traffic.
