CHAPTER 4: The Name She Was Given

They took Lena to a quiet side room lined with mirrors and velvet curtains. Her manager apologized too many times, terrified of offending the Vales. Thomas dismissed everyone except Detective Morgan, an older woman with kind eyes and a voice trained to stay steady around broken people.
Lena answered what she could. She had been raised by a woman named Ruth Gray, who had died when Lena was fourteen. Ruth told her she had been abandoned outside a church, wrapped in a blue blanket with the bracelet on her wrist. There were no birth papers, only a baptism card that might have been forged.
Thomas listened without interrupting. Each detail took color from his face.
"The blanket," he said finally. "Elise vanished in a blue coat. We found one sleeve near the pier. Everyone assumed..."
He could not finish.
Lena looked at him then, really looked. Famous photographs made him seem larger than life, but in that room he was simply a man who had been holding his breath for eighteen years.
"What if I'm not her?" she asked.
Thomas answered carefully. "Then I will still be sorry for frightening you. But if you are, I owe you every lost day."