Chapter 1 - THE ALLEY
“Mom, why does that boy have your necklace?”
I turned so fast I nearly dropped the bakery bag.
Lily was gone from my side. One second she’d been asking for a cinnamon roll, and the next she’d vanished around the corner with the sandwich I’d packed for her lunch.
“Lily!”
I found her in the alley behind the bakery. She stood beside a boy in a jacket too thin for the cold. He held her sandwich with both hands, but he hadn’t taken a bite.
“He’s hungry,” my eight-year-old said.
“I can see that. You still can’t run off.”
“Mom.” She pointed at his chest. “Look.”
A small silver airplane hung from a cord around the boy’s neck.
Half an airplane.
My hand went beneath my shirt and closed around the matching piece.
The boy looked about nine. Dirt marked his cheek, and his dark hair fell into eyes I knew better than my own.
“Noah?” I whispered.
His grip tightened on the sandwich. “How do you know my name?”
My son had been four when his father picked him up from preschool. Neither of them came home. Three days later, police found their car near the river, empty and streaked with mud. For five years, people had told me to stop looking.
I crouched, afraid one sudden move would send this boy running.
“Can you turn your necklace over?”
He hesitated, then flipped the silver charm. On the back were a tiny N and a date: October 17.
The day Noah disappeared.
His sleeve slipped down as he moved. Near his wrist was a crescent-shaped birthmark. I had kissed it every night when he was little.
My knees hit the pavement.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s Mom.”
He stared at me. Then, slowly, he stepped forward. I wrapped my arms around him and felt how thin he was.
For one breath, he held on.
Then he whispered against my shoulder, “The man who raised me said my real mother didn’t want me.”
I pulled back. “What man?”
Noah looked past me, toward the mouth of the alley. His face changed.
May you like
“He told me,” Noah said, “that if you ever found me, I had to run.”
A car door slammed at the end of the block.
