Chương 1
"“They’re your granddaughters, Maxwell. Our daughter was their mother.”
Elizabeth Winters forced the words through a breath that seemed too small to carry them. Her tired brown eyes stayed fixed on Maxwell’s face, as if looking away might allow him to escape the meaning.
He stood beside the hospital bed with one hand resting on the back of a white chair. His fingers tightened until the tendons showed beneath his skin. For one suspended moment, the soft beeping of the monitor seemed louder than the traffic far below the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Beyond the partially open glass door, an eight-year-old girl in a dusty-pink cardigan clutched a brown teddy bear to her chest. Long copper-brown hair fell over one shoulder. She watched him with the guarded concentration of a child trying to decide whether an unfamiliar adult was dangerous.
Maxwell’s breath returned in a shallow pull.
“We had a daughter?”
Elizabeth gave one weak nod.
“For twenty-nine years.”
He looked toward the girl behind the glass. She did not lower her eyes. The nurse standing behind her kept one hand close to the child’s shoulder without touching her.
The girl had Elizabeth’s mouth.
Maxwell turned back to the bed.
“No,” he said, but the word lacked force. It was not denial so much as a reflex, the last movement of a door that had already been kicked open. “You would have told me.”
Elizabeth’s lips trembled. She wet them, swallowed, and glanced at the monitor as though asking it for another minute.
“She died last winter,” she said. “The girls have no one left.”
The girl’s arms tightened around the teddy bear.
Maxwell moved the chair a few inches closer. One of its legs dragged softly against the polished floor.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Elizabeth’s eyes filled, but the tears did not fall. Her face had gone almost colorless against the pillow.
“Your mother made sure I couldn’t.”
The low music coming from somewhere in the room’s ceiling speakers stopped, though Maxwell had not noticed it beginning. One isolated monitor beep remained.
He turned slowly toward the glass door.
Lucy Winters watched him turn.
Later, Maxwell would remember everything that followed in the wrong order. He would remember the white flowers on the side table before he remembered asking Elizabeth what his mother had done. He would remember the nurse guiding Lucy away before he remembered that another child—Lily—had been waiting with a hospital social worker around the corner. He would remember the city lights reflected in the reinforced glass, his own dark figure laid over Lucy’s smaller one, before he remembered Elizabeth saying their daughter’s name.
Nora.
He said it once, quietly.
Elizabeth closed her eyes.
“Nora Winters,” she whispered. “She was stubborn. She hated bananas. She could draw anything except hands.”
Maxwell stared at her.
The room contained expensive things designed to look unobtrusive: concealed oxygen outlets, a monitor mounted flush to the wall, a private refrigerator behind pale wood paneling, controls that could summon nurses without making a sound. His foundation’s name appeared on a brass plaque in the lobby twenty-two floors below. None of that seemed connected to the woman dying beneath a cream blanket or to the daughter who had lived twenty-nine years without him.
“Nora,” he repeated.
Elizabeth opened her eyes again.
“She knew who you were.”
The words landed with more force than the first revelation.
Maxwell’s hand slipped from the chair.
“She knew?”
“I told her when she was seventeen.”
“Why seventeen?”
“Because that was when she stopped believing the lies I told her.”
He wanted to ask what lies. He wanted to ask what his mother had threatened, what Elizabeth had accepted, what Nora had believed, why no one had come to him, why a billionaire with offices in twelve countries could be kept ignorant of his own child.
Instead he asked, “Did she try to contact me?”
Elizabeth looked past him toward the glass doorway.
“Yes.”
The answer was barely audible.
“How?”
“I don’t know all of it.”
“You just said—”
“She stopped telling me after the first few times.” Elizabeth’s breathing roughened. “She said your people were very clear.”
Maxwell’s jaw tightened.
“What people?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must know a name.”
“Maxwell.”
He stopped.
She had used his name the way she used to when they were nineteen and he had become too angry to hear anything. He had not thought about that voice in years. He had trained himself not to.
Elizabeth drew another strained breath.
“Not tonight,” she said. “Don’t make this about proving you were innocent.”
He looked at the glass again. Lucy had disappeared from the doorway. The nurse remained for half a second, then stepped away.
“What do you want from me?”
Elizabeth’s eyelids lowered with exhaustion.
“To know them.”
“That’s all?”
A faint, humorless smile touched her mouth.
“You still think ‘all’ means easy.”
He flinched.
A soft knock came from the open door. A woman in her early fifties stood there holding a tablet against her navy cardigan. She had short gray-blond hair and the expression of someone accustomed to entering rooms after lives had changed.
“Mr. Rothschild,” she said. “I’m Dana Bell, the hospital social worker. The girls are with my colleague. We need to discuss what happens next.”
Maxwell did not move.
Elizabeth looked at Dana.
“Give us one minute.”
Dana hesitated, then stepped back.
Maxwell lowered himself into the chair. It was the first time he had sat since entering the room twenty minutes earlier, after receiving a call from a private number and being told that Elizabeth Winters was dying and had asked for him by name.
He leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees.
“Tell me what my mother did.”
Elizabeth’s gaze moved to his hands.
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“Do you remember the apartment in Queen Anne?”
He did. A narrow second-floor place above a bakery that began mixing dough before dawn. The bedroom window had rattled when buses passed. Elizabeth had kept chipped blue mugs in a row above the sink and complained that Maxwell never rinsed toothpaste from the basin.
