The cruelty in her voice was the final piece of the puzzle. These people hadn’t just stolen my past; they had replaced it with a nightmare.
“Press it then,” I said, taking a step toward her. “I’ve been dead for two years, Ellen. I’ve been living in a fog, waking up in a body I didn’t recognize, married to a ghost. You think I’m afraid of the dark?”
I kept walking.
“I’ll do it!” she screamed, her thumb hovering over the red button.
“Do it. But look at the screen first.”
She glanced at the monitor. My mother wasn’t alone anymore. Behind her stood a team of men in tactical gear. And next to her was a man I hadn’t seen in the photos. He was older, gray-haired, but he had my eyes.
“Hello, Ellen,” the man said.
“Arthur?” Ellen whispered, her face turning ashen. “You’re dead. The accident…”
“The accident Marcus staged?” my father said, his voice trembling with rage. “I survived. It took me ten years to find where you hid my daughter. Ten years of reconstructive surgery and searching every medical record in the country.”
Ellen’s hand shook. The remote slipped from her fingers, clattering to the floor.
The sound of shattering glass echoed from the floor above. The police were in the house.
I didn’t wait for them. I walked over to the table and picked up the red folder. I looked at the photo of the fifteen-year-old girl—Lucia. She looked so happy. She didn’t know about neurologists or inheritances. She just knew the sun was warm.
I looked down at Marcus. He was still breathing, but his eyes were vacant. The “Masterpiece” had become the victim of his own art.
“The memory hasn’t returned,” I whispered, repeating the words he had said to me at 2:47 AM. “And now, yours never will.”
The hidden door burst open. Men in black uniforms flooded the room, their flashlights cutting through the clinical glare.
I didn’t look at the police. I didn’t look at Mrs. Ellen as they handcuffed her. I walked straight to the monitor. I put my hand on the screen, over my mother’s face.
“Mom?” I whispered.
“I’m here, Lucia,” she sobbed. “I’m right here. We’re coming to get you.”
I turned away from the gurney, away from the syringes, and away from the life of Valentina Rhodes. As I walked through the hidden passage and out into the cool night air of New York, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the sirens or the flashing lights.
It was the smell of the air. It didn’t smell like clinical alcohol.
It smelled like rain.
And for the first time in two years, I didn’t feel sleepy at all.
I walked toward the gates, my bare feet hitting the pavement, each step a reclamation. I was Lucia Armenta. I was the girl who woke up.
And I was going to make sure that the name Valentina Rhodes was buried so deep that even Marcus, in his empty, hollow mind, would never find it again.
