In any other circumstances, Lyra would have responded with a look of her own, one that saidBehave, Mom, but Lyra didn’t have it in her to sink into that kind of comforting back-and-forth right now.
She took a step back. “Mom, this is Grayson. Grayson, this is my mom.”
“You can call me Darby.”
“And you can call me Keith,” a voice said from the porch. “Or Coach.” Lyra looked up to see her dad, who opened his arms. Despite everything, Lyra ran up the steps and into them like she was nine years old.
Down below, Grayson held out a hand to Lyra’s mother. “Grayson Hawthorne,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you start from the beginning, Lyra?”
The kitchen table at Mile’s End was large, a testament to the size of the families who had sat around it in generations past. Lyra knew each and every chip in the old wood, and she pressed her fingers into one, a soothingly familiar groove, as she replied to her dad’s suggestion: “You two first.”
Her parents were seated next to each other, across from Lyra and Grayson, none of them at the head of the table.
“Tell me what you should have told me years ago,” Lyra continued quietly. “Tell me about my fourth birthday.”
Her mom was the one who replied. “We tried to tell you, baby. For more than a year, with three different therapists, we tried, but they all told us to take your lead, and you never said a word about what had happened—not to the therapists, not to us, not in play, not even if someone else started the story as a fairy tale and asked you what should happen next. You showed no signs of regression. You displayed no hallmarks of trauma, not even a hint that you remembered that day at all. You were just—” Her mom smiled in what Lyra recognized as an attempt not to cry. “A very happy little girl.”
“A normal girl.” The words caught in Lyra’s throat, because when the memories of that dayhadresurfaced, that was what she’d lost. Feeling normal. Feeling right. Feelingreal. Afterward, she couldn’t even dance without feeling like she was pretending, like she was a fraud. But Lyra hadn’t come home to try to explain that to her parents, not after years of going out of her way to avoid doing exactly that.
Lyra had come here to make sense of Eve’s file and the man in those pictures. “You said that this was Tomás.” Lyra opened the folder and turned it around toward her mother. “My biological father. But this isn’t the man who took me.”
“You thought Tomás took you?” Lyra’s mom stared at her. “Why in the world would you think that?”
Because the man who took me told me he was my father. Because the teachers said he had my eyes.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning, Darby?” Grayson co-opted Lyra’s dad’s earliersuggestion, gentle but no-nonsense tone and all. “The morning of Lyra’s fourth birthday. She remembers bits and pieces, but she needs to hear it from you.”
On the other side of the table, Lyra’s mom reached for Lyra’s dad’s hand and then spoke. “You woke up at the crack of dawn that morning,” she told Lyra, “and I made you Wonder Cakes for breakfast. That’s what we called pancakes with cream cheese icing and—”
“Rainbow sprinkles,” Lyra finished. Her body felt odd—not numb exactly, but like she wasn’t quite in it anymore.
Her dad picked up where her mom had left off. “We put candles inthe Wonder Cakes, and you blew them out and made your wish. You weren’t forthcoming on the exact details, but you did let on that your wish involved cotton candy and a tractor.”
Lyra knew somehow that beneath the table, her dad was running the fingers on his free hand over one of the grooves.Like father, like daughter.
“We were going to keep you home from preschool,” her dad continued, his jaw visibly clenching, “to spend the day with us, but you wanted to go.”
“You insisted on wearing a new dressandyour soccer cleats.” Lyra’s mom smiled slightly. “There was no talking you out of it. We apologized to your teachers about the cleats, but they took it in stride. You adored them and that school.” Anger and pain flashed across Lyra’s mother’s face. “We never brought you back again. After.”
Lyra’s dad’s jaw visibly hardened. “Those teachers we trusted, those teachers you loved so much—they justgaveyou to him. Didn’t even ask for his ID. Just handed you over like it was nothing, likeyouwere.”
“Your dad hadn’t adopted you yet.” Lyra’s mom’s eyes blazed like hellfire. “But the school knew your bio-father wasn’t involved, that he had no custody. And then a man waltzes in off the street, claiming you’re his, and they just hand you over? Because his hair was black, and his skin was the same color as yours, and that was apparently all it took.”
Lyra had never looked a thing like her mother.
“You’re saying that the man who took mewasn’tmy father—he only claimed to be?”I went with him. They handed me over, and I went.“But I remember—” Lyra gritted out the words. “He had my eyes, not just brown butamber. The teachers kept saying he lookedjust like me.”
I’m your father, Lyra.Words rang through her memory.
Lie-rah.
Lie-rah.
He’d pronounced her name wrong, like he’d only ever seen it written down.
Grayson slipped his hand into Lyra’s beneath the table. “What happened next?” he asked her parents calmly. “From your perspectives.”
