Chapter 1 - THE GIRL WITH THE ROSES
Victoria Vale was halfway through lunch when a little girl walked up to her table carrying a silver plate filled with red roses.
The restaurant was busy with its usual afternoon crowd: attorneys from the financial district, women celebrating birthdays over expensive wine, and business executives who chose their tables according to who might see them. Sunlight poured through the tall windows beneath crystal chandeliers. Victoria had come alone because she needed an hour away from her family’s offices before a meeting about the sale of a downtown property.
The girl stood beside the table in a cream-colored sweater, holding the plate carefully with both hands.
“Ma’am, I brought you some flowers.”
Victoria looked up from her phone. The girl was seven or eight, with brown hair pulled into a ponytail and an expression too earnest for someone approaching a stranger in such an expensive restaurant.
“For me?”
The girl nodded.
Victoria smiled. “That’s very kind of you.”
She put her phone down and reached toward the roses.
The girl’s expression changed.
Her eyes locked onto the large gold ring on Victoria’s right hand. A deep red ruby caught the light as Victoria moved her fingers. The girl stared at it so intensely that Victoria stopped reaching for the plate.
“Why are you wearing my mom’s ring?”
Victoria glanced at her hand.
“What did you just say?”
The girl set the roses down and pointed. “My mom has a ring just like that.”
Victoria’s smile faded.
The ring was not something a child should have recognized as ordinary jewelry. It had been designed by her mother more than twenty years earlier. Two matching gold rings, each set with a ruby from their grandmother’s earrings, had been commissioned for Victoria and her younger sister.
Victoria wore hers every day.
Her sister had been buried with nothing.
“What’s your mother’s name?” Victoria asked.
The girl looked suddenly uncertain, as though she had realized she was talking about something adults considered private.
“Sophia.”
Victoria stopped breathing.
The restaurant continued around her. Someone laughed near the bar. A waiter carried a tray past the table. Glasses touched softly beneath the chandeliers.
Victoria barely heard any of it.
“That’s impossible,” she whispered. “Sophia died eight years ago.”
The little girl frowned.
“No, she didn’t.”
Victoria stared at her.
“My mom made breakfast this morning.”
For several seconds, Victoria could not move.
Then she noticed the girl’s eyes.
They were the same dark hazel as her sister’s. Not similar in the way people sometimes search for resemblance after hearing a familiar name. The shape, the slight upward turn at the corners, even the small crease between her eyebrows when she frowned were painfully recognizable.
“What’s your name?”
“Lily.”
“Lily what?”
“Lily Torres.”
Victoria tried to steady herself.
“Where is your mother, Lily?”
The girl glanced toward the restaurant entrance. “At home. She’s sick today.”
“Who brought you here?”
“Aunt Rosa. We brought the flowers.”
Before Victoria could ask another question, a woman in a florist’s apron hurried toward them from the service corridor.
“Lily! I told you to stay beside the cart.”
The woman stopped when she saw Victoria’s face.
Victoria stood so abruptly her chair scraped against the marble floor.
“Rosa?”
The woman’s hand tightened around the handle of the flower cart.
Victoria recognized her too.
Rosa Torres had worked as a nursing assistant at the private hospital where Sophia supposedly died.
Eight years ago, Rosa had been the person who brought Victoria her sister’s belongings.
Including the ruby ring that had never actually left Victoria’s hand.
Rosa looked from Victoria to Lily.
Then she whispered, “Oh, God.”
Victoria took one step toward her.
“Where is my sister?”
Rosa did not answer.
Instead, she grabbed Lily’s hand.
“We need to go.”
Victoria followed them toward the service entrance, but Rosa turned before they reached the door.
“If you want Sophia alive,” she said, “don’t tell your father you saw this child.”
Victoria froze.
Her father.
Richard Vale had arranged Sophia’s funeral.
He had also been the person who told Victoria there was no reason to question the death certificate.
Now a woman who had worked at the hospital was standing in Victoria’s restaurant with a little girl who looked like Sophia, warning her that telling Richard could get her sister killed.
Victoria looked down at the ring.
May you like
For eight years, she had worn it because it reminded her of the sister she lost.
For the first time, she wondered whether it had been returned to her for an entirely different reason.
