Chapter 5
“Where is he?”
Marina asked.
Mother hesitated.
That mattered.
“Alive?”
Mother nodded.
“At least eighteen months ago.”
Marina stood so quickly the chair scraped backward.
“Where?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
Wrong answer for a desperate daughter.
She turned vicious immediately.
“You’re lying again.”
I stepped between them.
“Enough.”
Her eyes flashed.
“She kept him from me.”
Mother answered:
“No. Sabine did.”
Then she explained.
After Gideon escaped, he settled under another name.
Mother kept one narrow channel open.
No letters.
No calls.
Too easy to trace in those years.
Instead, once each year on Marina’s birthday, Gideon sent white camellias to Mother through a trusted nursery.
One arrangement.
No card.
Proof he was alive.
Mother would send back the same flowers dyed blue if she had news of Marina.
For twenty-two years, she never did.
Because Sabine had moved Marina under a new name.
Then three years ago, the flowers changed.
White camellias.
One red bloom in the center.
Their emergency signal.
Gideon had learned something was wrong.
Mother tried to trace the source privately.
Nothing.
Then last year, no flowers.
This year, none again.
Marina stared.
“You knew he might be in trouble and said nothing?”
Mother’s face tightened.
“To whom?”
Silence.
That was the tragedy.
Everyone had been protecting secrets from people who had disappeared behind other secrets.
Then I asked the question nobody wanted.
“Why did you come back as Delphina?”
Marina looked at me.
Our wedding band on her finger.
The answer mattered now more than anything.
“At first?”
She swallowed.
“To find him.”
There.
“And me?”
Her eyes filled.
“At first, you were access.”
The room became very quiet.
Then:
“Later, you weren’t.”
May you like
That might have mattered yesterday.
Tonight it only made everything more complicated.
