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She stepped in.
“Hands up,” Sam said. Even tone. Cool as ever.
She did as he asked, but the dog—a chocolate lab, from what I could tell—trotted in, uninhibited.
“Are you armed?” Sam asked.
With a nod of her head, she pulled a gun from a shoulder holster tucked beneath her fleece jacket. Then she pulled a knife from her boot. She placed both weapons on the floor, and Nick swept in, kicking them out of range.
“I am a friend, Sam,” she said.
While she didn’t sound old or haggard, I could tell she wasn’t younger than thirty. Her voice had a depth to it, an authoritative edge, like she’d seen a lot and wouldn’t take crap from anyone.
Sam motioned to Cas and Trev. They squeezed past us and left through the back door. Checking the perimeter, as planned.
Turn on the lights, I thought. I want to know if it’s really her, see her with my eyes. But we stayed in the dark as Sam gestured her forward. “Sit,” he said. She sat. I peeked around the doorway from the kitchen. When she saw me, I swear something flashed in her eyes, but whatever it was, it was gone before I could name it.
The dog came to her side and lay on the floor, tail swishing.
No one said a word.
When the boys returned with the news that the perimeter was clear, Sam finally flicked on the lights. It took me a second to adjust, and I blinked the light burn from my eyes. When my vision cleared, a woman came into view. Black hair. Willowy. Eyes the color of summer grass. Wrinkles at the corners of her mouth like wind cutting through sand.
I sucked in a breath and the air crystallized in my lungs.
“Oh my God,” I breathed.
It was her. My mother. Alive.
The words didn’t seem to want to come together in my head. She’d never been more to me than pages and words in a journal. A woman in a picture. But she was flesh and blood. Real. Alive.
This woman might have been older than the woman in my photograph. Her hair might have grayed around the temples. Her cheeks might have looked thinner than those of the twentysomething woman at that lake’s edge. But it didn’t matter. I knew it was her.
“Sura?” Sam said. The name sounded foreign spoken aloud there in the cabin’s modest living room.
She nodded. The dog sat up.
A million questions washed through my head and I couldn’t grab on to one of them long enough to ask. Why hadn’t she ever gotten in touch with me? Did she recognize me?
Sam sat on the couch and dragged me down next to him. He threaded his fingers with mine. His hand was cool and dry and sturdy. Mine trembled, slick with sweat.
“I’ve been waiting for you boys to contact me for days,” she said. “I caught word through the line that you’d escaped. I was going to wait for you in Pennsylvania, but I got spooked and took off.” She shook her head. Her braid shifted. Why wasn’t she looking at me?
“So, tell me, what is going on? I had no idea….” She trailed off, wringing her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry, Samuel. I really am. I tried looking for you for a few years after you disappeared, but I couldn’t find you.”
I fidgeted, and Sam’s hold on me tightened. Not yet, was the message, loud and clear.
“One of the clues led to your phone number,” Sam said.
She nodded. “That was the plan, in case they cleaned you out. You gave me a phone and asked me to keep it on, always. I didn’t know about this place.” She gave the room a cursory glance. “But then, you never were forthcoming with details.”
“How do you know me?” Sam asked.
“You and Dani came to me a little over five years ago and asked for my help. I knew Dani through her uncle.” Her eyes lost focus for a second, but she quickly shook it off. “Anyway, you stole something from the Branch that you were going to use to buy your freedom. But then Dani disappeared. You planted the clues as a backup plan before going after her.” The dog whined. “You never came back.”
“Hold on a minute.” Cas held up his hand. “I’m having trouble keeping up. Who is Dani?”
Sam dug the picture of himself from the back pocket of his pants. It’d been folded in half, and the edges were worn to the white paper beneath the ink.
An odd, nameless emotion stirred in me. What did it mean that he kept the picture folded in his back pocket, like a memento?
He showed Sura the picture. “Is that Dani?”
Sura didn’t need more than a second to decide. “Sure is.”
“I don’t remember her.” Sam took it back, hid it away. “Why was I going after her?”
“Well… you loved her. It’s as simple as that. And Connor took her from you.”
The nameless emotion intensified, brittle and tangy on the tip of my tongue. And suddenly I knew what it was: heartache. If she was the whole reason Sam had planted clues, the whole reason he’d eventually been caught, that meant that if not for her, Sam would never have been locked in the lab. I never would have met him. I both loved and hated this girl.
“I don’t know what happened to her,” Sam said. “But sometimes I have flashes of a girl.”
I looked over at him. He’d never told me that.
“I don’t see a face,” he went on, “but maybe it’s her?”
If he’d done everything in his power to find this girl five years ago—tattooed himself, scarred himself, gone up against the Branch—what would he do now?
He’d made me a promise that he would always have my back, but when it came down to choosing between Dani and me, who would he choose? If it meant sacrificing one of us to protect the group, I wasn’t sure which side he’d pick.
Sura clasped her hands together. “They really cleaned you out, didn’t they? Tell me what you do remember.”
Nick grunted. “Try f**king none of it.”
Her gaze swept to Nick. “Well, Nicholas, I can see not much has changed with you. All brass and balls.”
Cas choked on a laugh, and Nick gave him a hostile look.
“We woke up in a lab five years ago,” Sam explained. “We have only vague memory flashes of our lives before that.”
Sura nodded, like that made sense now that she knew the facts. “All right. So let’s start over. Tell me about your escape. I’m vaguely familiar with him”—she pointed at Trev, then turned her attention on me—“but I don’t know this young lady.”
Sam tensed. I tensed. Everyone tensed. “You don’t recognize her?”
Sura deepened the V of her brow. “Should I?”
Trev fidgeted in the doorway. Nick cracked a knuckle. I wasn’t sure what they’d expected, but sixteen years had passed since my mother last saw me. I’d changed a lot in that time. Couldn’t they give her a second before they jumped to conclusions?
Sura examined me. Dad had told me I had her eyes, but now I wasn’t so sure. Hers were dark green, and mine were hazel. She’d been too far away in the picture I had of her for me to see before that the comparison wasn’t right.
“This is Anna,” Sam said.
“Anna,” she repeated, like she was trying out my name, like it felt familiar, but she wasn’t sure why. “Well, Anna, it’s nice to meet you.”
I stared at her, the greeting saying all there was to say. And the longer I stared at her, the blurrier she became, as my vision clouded with tears.
“Sura, Anna is your daughter,” Sam said. But even he didn’t sound convinced.
A ringing noise filled my head as she looked at me, really looked at me, the fine lines around her eyes deepening. “What exactly did they tell you?”
“You don’t recognize her?”
She sighed when she turned back to me. “Honey, I’ve never been pregnant.”
The weight of so many days of fear and uncertainty abruptly overcame me. The ringing grew louder, and a choked sob escaped me. I leapt from the couch. The dog lifted his head, jangling the tags on his collar. I hurried through the kitchen. The dog barked behind me. I burst outside, the wind too cold now as tears streamed down my face.
“Anna!” Sam’s footfalls pounded the ground behind me as I ran, unsure of where I was going—anywhere was fine, as long as it was far from here. All those years I’d wished I’d known my mother, and now here she was, and I wasn’t her daughter?
“Anna, stop!”
Brittle ferns whipped against my knees. A branch snagged my hair. I lost my momentum and Sam caught up, spinning me around.
“She doesn’t know me!” I screamed, pushing him away, because I didn’t want him to see me fall apart, and because I couldn’t stand still for one second longer.
“We have to find out why,” he said. “Stop!”
I buried my face in the crook of his neck. He smelled like Ivory soap and clean, crisp air. He smelled like home.
I just wanted to go back, even if none of it was real. I missed the predictability of everything. At home I knew what to expect, and Sam would always be there and I would always be Anna with a mother who was dead and a dad who spent every waking minute working.
That was my life. It might not have been much, or even true, but it was mine.
We stood there in the middle of the woods as Sam let me cry. He held me tightly, like he was afraid that, given the opportunity, I’d run again. And maybe I would have. Maybe I would have run as far as my legs would have taken me.
“She’s not my mother,” I said finally, wiping the tears from my cheeks. Speaking the words aloud made them seem truer. Maybe deep down I’d known this was a possibility—ever since I’d found that sticky note, her handwriting there in the present, matching the handwriting in the journal from the past. Maybe I’d known since then.
My dad might have lied about a lot of things, but lying to me about whether Sura was my mother seemed too devious even for him. So why did he do it? What purpose would it serve?
“If she isn’t my mother, then who is?”
A gust of wind shook the trees. “I don’t know,” Sam said. “But I promise you, we’ll find out.”
25
GROWING UP, I’D DESPERATELY WANTED to know my mother. It was probably why I drew her so often, as if my pencil would somehow fill in the blanks. And now here she was in front of me, and she wasn’t even mine to know. That hurt worse than anything. I thought I’d been given a second chance, only to have it snatched away.
Trev handed me a mug of instant coffee. Sura got one to match. Sam sat next to me, so close we touched. He’d already made it clear he wasn’t going anywhere.
“We’ll be out in the garage,” Trev said, “tending to the generator.”
I caught Sam’s half nod out of the corner of my eye. He’d dismissed Cas and Nick earlier with some discreet gesture I missed. To give me as much privacy as possible.
When I came back inside, I’d wanted to retreat to my bedroom and curl into a ball and mentally dissect everything I thought I knew about myself. Memories of my father, the things he’d said about my mother. I wanted to flip through her journal, looking for clues that I might have missed before. It was Sam who insisted I sit down with Sura.
Flames crackled in the fireplace and the chill in my hands dissipated.
“Why don’t you tell me about Arthur?” Sura said. “About you.”
“Um…” I licked my lips, brought the coffee mug down to chest height. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Maybe I should start with me?” she offered. “About me and Arthur?”
“He told me you died when I was one, but obviously that isn’t true.”
She shook her head and tucked her feet up into the chair. “We divorced thirteen years ago.”
I frowned. “But that would have made me four at the time. Did he… um… you know…”