Chapter 1 - THE GIRL AT OUR TABLE
I grabbed our new maid’s wrist during dinner, and my husband dropped his knife.
Not his fork.
His knife.
It struck his plate with a sharp crack, but I barely heard it.
A silver moon hung beneath the girl’s white collar.
I knew that moon.
I had chosen it nineteen years earlier, back when my daughter still believed I could catch the real one and bring it down for her.
“Where did you get that?”
The girl went still.
Around our dining table, conversation stopped.
My sister, Vivian, lowered her wineglass.
My husband, Richard, stood.
“Caroline,” he said.
“Let her go.”
But the girl was already touching the necklace.
“My foster mother gave it to me.”
Her name was Clara.
When our house manager had introduced her that afternoon, I’d felt the familiar sting of hearing my daughter’s name on someone else.
It happened sometimes.
A grocery store cashier.
A woman answering a phone.
You learned to survive it.
You did not learn to stop looking.
“May I?”
I pointed to the locket.
Clara hesitated, then nodded.
My fingers shook so badly I almost couldn’t work the clasp.
Inside, beneath a shallow scratch, were four words.
FOR CLARA, FROM MAMA.
My knees weakened.
Richard moved toward us.
“Caroline, you’re frightening her.”
Then I saw the scar.
A pale, crooked line ran along the inside of her wrist.
When my daughter was three, she had pushed a garden gate while holding a broken flowerpot.
The jagged edge had cut her.
I had held her through the stitches.
I remembered the doctor’s blue sleeves.
The cartoon bandage.
Her small voice asking if scars went away when you grew up.
“No,” I whispered.
Clara pulled back.
“I’m sorry.
Did I do something?”
“My daughter had that scar.”
Someone’s chair scraped the floor.
Vivian was standing now.
“That’s enough, Caroline.”
But Arthur, our butler of thirty-one years, had already left the room.
He returned carrying a photo album.
He didn’t look at Richard.
He opened it between us.
There she was.
My little girl, sitting on my lap in a yellow sweater, smiling through the gap where she had lost a tooth.
The moon rested against her chest.
Her bandaged wrist lay in my hand.
Clara stared.
“That sweater,” she said.
I couldn’t breathe.
“What?”
Her eyes filled.
“I remember the sleeve scratching my stitches.”
Across the table, Richard whispered something.
I turned toward him.
He wasn’t looking at me.
May you like
He was looking at Vivian.
“You said she was gone.”
