Page 8 of City of Liars

“The dress. It was hers. She’s got a whole closet of these amazing vintage clothes. Stuff she wore in Manhattan in the ’40s. And, well, she insisted I wear that dress last night.” No need to tell him about the disastrous date with Mustache Man. “I guess she’s living vicariously through me, but I don’t mind. It makes her so happy.” I took a self-conscious gulp of coffee. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything. I know it’s weird.”

“You love your grandma. That’s not weird. It’s sweet.” He grinned at me over the rim of his mug. “Now, the fact that she dressed you hot like whoa and sent you out on the town...that’s a little peculiar, I’ll admit.”

“Shut up.” I leaned across the table to swat him, but he dodged out of the way.

“My family’s from New York City too,” he said as a peace offering, draining his mug.

It was my turn to raise my eyebrows. Even though I’d grown up in Manhattan, we lived in North Carolina now, in a sleepy town sandwiched between a beach and a river. But people came to Wilmington from all over, and I guessed it wasn’t that odd that Theo was a fellow New Yorker. “Really?” I said to Theo. “Maybe they were friends back in the day.”

“I doubt it, if yours was busy hanging out in Manhattan high society. My great-grandparents were immigrants from Lithuania. Clawed their way out of some serious poverty on the Lower East Side. They probably sewed half the dresses your grandmother wore.” His tone was light, but beneath the surface I detected an old hurt.

An uneasy feeling swept over me. You didn’t grow up in my family without getting nervous when someone mentioned the residents of lower Manhattan’s turn-of-the-century tenements. But I blew it off. “Surely not,” I said, knotting my fingers around my mug.

“It’s more possible than you’d think. That’s what they did, work in garment factories. Even the kids. My Grandma Susi used to piece clothing together at night when she was little. She’s got all kinds of stories.” His jaw clenched.

The name hovered at the edge of my consciousness, oddly familiar. Seeking to reclaim our playful mood, I unknotted my fingers and reached across the table, taking one of his hands in mine.

He looked up, features set in apology. “I’m sorry. I’m being stupid. Let’s talk about something else. Like—what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a trauma therapist.”

His face rearranged itself into the puzzled expression I was used to seeing when I talked about my career. With a sigh, I went on.

“Basically, I help people who’ve survived traumatic experiences find ways to process what’s happened to them. My specialty is generational trauma. And I have a particular interest in epigenetics…understanding how an ancestor’s traumatic experience can alter biochemistry and the expression of DNA in future generations.” I had Tessa, a brilliant epigeneticist, to thank for that. “But most of what I do involves working with people to help them heal from traumatic events. I use regular talk therapy, but also EMDR, cognitive processing therapy, and a bunch of other approaches. Whatever works for my clients.”

Normally, this was the point where I lost my listener. But Theo didn’t look disinterested. He looked disturbed. “What got you interested in that?”

“It’s a long story.”

He shrugged, smiling. “I’ve got time.”

I took a sip of coffee, warming to my explanation. “I love understanding what makes people tick. And I’ve always been fascinated with the roots of trauma. How they manifest in a person, and how they can get passed along to future generations.”

His brows knitted. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, encouraged by what seemed like genuine interest on his part, “this researcher, Rachel Yehuda, studied the neurobiology of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. She found that not only do Holocaust survivors with PTSD have lower levels of cortisol—their descendants were born with decreased cortisol levels and tended to have PTSD, too, even though they weren’t in the camps themselves.”

I waited for him to slide under the table and fall asleep, the way Gray had always threatened to do when I started talking about this stuff. But instead, Theo folded his arms over his bare chest.

“Go on,” he said.

I did my best not to get distracted by his biceps. “You’re actually interested in this? Because most people⁠—”

“I asked, didn’t I?” He gave me a small smile, but something about it seemed forced.

“Right.” I cleared my throat. “So, Yehuda went on to study war veterans and people who’d been pregnant during the 9/11 attacks. She found the exact same pattern. Low levels of cortisol and the presence of PTSD in survivors as well as their children, and their children’s children. Not to mention anxiety and depression. Am I boring you to death yet?”

Theo shifted his weight. “Not yet,” he said, his gaze flicking away. He didn’t look bored, exactly, but something about him seemed off, uneasy. Maybe he was just trying to be polite.

“I’ll try to wrap it up,” I said, taking pity on him. “The gist is that for years, scientists thought trauma survivors passed their mental health struggles down to their descendants through environmental and social cues, not genetics. You know, the whole ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. But what Yehuda’s research found is that people carry the ghosts of their ancestors’ unresolved traumas with them, embedded in their cellular biology—so they have symptoms of traumas they’ve never personally experienced. It’s wild, and also fascinating. At least, I think so.”

Now I had Theo’s attention. He was looking right at me, his hazel eyes narrowed. “So, what trauma’s lurking in your past, Liv?”

“Not me,” I said. “But way back in the day, when she was a toddler, my grandmother disappeared. No one really knows how it happened, because she was inside a park in New York City that requires a key to enter or leave. It took a year for my great-grandparents to find her. They ran ads in all the major papers, and finally some couple in Chicago saw one. They’d adopted my grandma from an agency in New York, and she matched the photo in the paper.”

I glanced up at Theo, expecting him to look intrigued, or at least curious. This had to be more interesting to him than epigenetic theory. But instead, he’d gone white.

“Go on,” he said, his voice tight.