Page 84 of Diamond In The Rough

“Did they suspect Malone?”

She silences for a thoughtful beat. Then replies, “If they did, they don’t mention it anywhere. Seems the authorities have made the connection, if only via a Post-it in Renee’s file. The cops weren’t gonna come for your father without proof; they had their suspicions, but they had no way of confirming it. This doesn’t appear to be a suspicion they passed on to Renee’s parents. Or, if they did, the parents aren’t obsessing over it.”

“Unlike you,” Felix inserts. “You had misgivings, and you obsessed, Darling.”

“I don’t know which is worse: knowing the truth, and not being able to change it, or not knowing, and living without ever getting answers. Regardless,” she exhales a noisy breath, the sound filling the car, “the Rossis keep to themselves. They mourn her, but they don’t steer a manhunt that leads this way. They hold vigils for the daughter they lost, but they don’t appear to be eager for vengeance.”

“Whose is she?” I swallow the lump in my throat, and study Felix when he looks at me.

“Whose mother,” I clarify. “You’ve found Cato’s, and you’re pretty close to figuring out Lix’s. That leaves three.”

“Well… the timing for this one is a little off. If we add nine months to the date of Renee’s disappearance, we’re not hitting anyone’s birthday.”

I ponder that. “Maybe she’s no one, then? Maybe she’s not one of the mothers at all.”

“Or maybe she miscarried,” Lix counters. “Or she could be one of the unlucky souls who birthed a girl.”

“Reasonable guesses. And, certainly, avenues I considered before making this call. But then I came across Renee’s brother’s obituary…”

I drag my bottom lip between my teeth and frown. “Renee’s brother?”

“Yeah.” Both our phones bleat again, twin texts that remind me I have my phone in my hand. “Sent you both a picture. I think you’ll understand my confusion once you see.”

Since Felix’s phone is being used for this call, I unlock my screen and glimpse, for just a second, Tiia’s name before it flicks away, and I find Christabelle’s instead.

Tiia has texted me. She wants to talk. Perhaps she wants to reject my dinner invitation. To kindly suggest I fuck off out of her life and never come back again.

Or maybe I’m just catastrophizing things that don’t require it.

Regardless, I set her aside for a minute more and open Christabelle’s text instead.

I tap the small thumbnail image she sent and press my lips closed when Caleb Rossi Junior stares back at me. His eyes, a little small for his large frame. His nose, straight as a ruler. His jaw is square, and his shoulders, broad enough to make his head look small.

“Renee was taken in June of her seventeenth year,” Christabelle continues. “Which would imply a child was born approximately nine or ten months later.”

“I was born in January,” I murmur. “Only seven months later. Which seems impossible, considering no one told me I was premature or sickly.”

“But, jaysus,” Lix growls, “genetics don’t lie.” He reaches across and taps my phone. “I could almost pretend he was you, if he wasn’t already six feet under.”

“The genetics don’t lie,” I agree. “Shit.”

“I’m going to ask Mary tonight,” Christabelle decides. “As your father’s housekeeper and sometimes lover, she’s the only person alive who was around at your birth. She assured me she attended every single delivery made inside that home.”

“Seven months is a fast pregnancy,” I grit out. “I would have been sick and small. I would still be small, no? Stunted growth and all that shit.”

Lix smiles. “Maybe you are small…er than you were supposed to be. You have the largest shoulders of the five of us. Six feet, four inches tall. You’re not small. But your brother was,” he looks back at my phone, “Six-nine and a linebacker.”

“Her brother. Not mine.”

“He was a monster. And you have the shoulders to carry more.”

“I don’t claim the rest of them.” I study Lix’s phone, almost as though I could look into Christabelle’s eyes. “Not her parents. Not her siblings. I have a family already; I don’t want them.”

“You don’t have to take them. They have no clue you exist, and they haven’t come looking in all this time. I think it’s safe to say that Renee Rossi was your mother, Micah. And there are questions about your gestation and birth that need answering. But no one is gonna tell you what you have to do with that information.”

“We create a marker.” I fist my phone and glance out the window. “We put her name on it and place it in the orchard where she’s buried. She deserves to have her resting place marked and acknowledgment of who she was and what became of her. But that’s it.” I examine the New York City streets as we putter through dense traffic. “I don’t want this to become a whole thing. I don’t want to know her story.”

“You don’t want to know she was gonna be a doctor?” Lix presses. “Or that she spent her spare time at rich-people art auctions?”

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