Chapter 3: What Elena Left Behind
Victor was outside for eleven minutes.
I counted because I had nothing else to do except watch the children's faces and try to look calm for them.
Mia had climbed onto the old sofa and pulled her knees to her chest.
The twins sat on either side of her without saying a word.
Lucas stood near the back wall with his arms folded, watching the door.
Daniel hadn't moved from the center of the room.
And Noah had gone back to his small mattress in the corner and picked up a worn stuffed rabbit that he carried everywhere.
He held it against his chest and looked at the door the same way he always looked at it when I came home.
Like he was certain someone good was about to walk through.
The door opened.
Victor's face was different when he came back.
Whatever the phone call had done to him, he had pushed it somewhere behind his eyes.
His expression was controlled.
Professional.
The same face he wore in his office when something had gone wrong and he didn't want his staff to know it yet.
He looked at me.
"Everyone outside except Olivia."
Daniel's chin came up.
"No."
Victor looked at him.
"Excuse me?"
"You don't get to give us orders," Daniel said.
"We don't know you.
Olivia knows you.
We don't."
The two security guards shifted near the doorway.
Victor raised that same hand again — the small gesture that meant *stand down* — and they stilled.
He looked at Daniel for a long moment.
Something moved through his expression that I couldn't name.
"You're right," he said.
"I apologize."
Daniel blinked.
He hadn't expected that.
Victor turned back to me.
"Will you ask them to wait upstairs?
I need five minutes.
Just five."
I looked at Daniel.
He looked at me.
A whole conversation passed between us in about two seconds — the kind that only happens between people who have been keeping each other alive.
"It's okay," I said.
"I'll call you if I need you."
Daniel held Victor's gaze for one more beat.
Then he nodded at the others and they filed out, Mia last, looking back at me over her shoulder until the door closed.
Victor waited until their footsteps faded above us.
Then he sat down on the nearest chair — not like a billionaire, not like a man used to commanding rooms.
He sat down like someone who needed to be off his feet.
"Tell me everything Elena told you," he said.
"From the beginning.
Leave nothing out."
So I did.
I told him about the afternoon she called me to her room, eight months before she passed.
How she had seemed smaller than usual, her hands folded in her lap, her voice steady in the way that people's voices get steady when they have already made peace with something hard.
"She said there were six children who had no one," I told him.
"She said she had been caring for them for three years.
She said she was running out of time and she needed someone to take over."
"Why you?" Victor asked.
"You were twelve years old."
"I asked her the same thing." I looked at the floor.
"She said I was the only person she trusted completely.
She said the others — the adults who knew — had already chosen to look away."
Victor was quiet.
"She gave me a key," I continued.
"And an envelope.
She told me not to open it until she was gone.
She said it would explain things I wasn't ready to understand yet."
His eyes sharpened.
"What was in the envelope?"
I crossed to the small cabinet beside the kitchen area.
Behind a stack of folded blankets, there was a tin box I had carried from the old apartment when we moved here three months ago.
I lifted the lid and took out the envelope.
It was worn at the edges now.
I had read it so many times the paper had gone soft.
I held it out to him.
He took it carefully, like he understood it was fragile.
He unfolded it and read.
I watched his face.
He read it once.
Then he went back to the top and read it again.
When he set it down, his hands were very still on his knees.
"She never told me," he said.
Not to me.
To the room.
To the air.
"Four years.
She never told me."
"She said you had moved on," I said quietly.
"She said she didn't want to be the reason your life went backward."
"Noah is—" He stopped.
"Elena said so.
In the letter."
He stood up.
Walked to the photograph on the wall.
Stood in front of it with his back to me.
"The phone call," I said.
"Who was it?"
He didn't answer right away.
"Someone who has known about Noah for longer than I have," he said.
"Someone who has been watching this building.
Someone who has a reason to make sure I never find out the truth."
My stomach dropped.
"Who?"
He turned around.
His expression had changed again — back to the controlled, careful face.
But underneath it, for just a moment, I saw something that looked very much like fear.
May you like
"My brother," he said.
"Richard."
