Damian set the phone face-down on the desk.

"How long have you been getting messages like that?" I asked.

"That's the first one." He picked it up again and called his head of security.

"Marcus.

Blocked number.

Just now.

I need it traced." A pause.

"I don't care what it takes."

He ended the call and looked at me steadily.

"Someone was watching the restaurant tonight," he said.

The thought moved through me like cold water.

Leah and I at the table.

The exits being sealed.

Every person in that room who had seen her grab my apron and cry out.

"You need to go home tonight with security," he said.

"I'm not asking."

"I live in a one-bedroom apartment above a laundromat, Damian."

"I know." He said it without embarrassment, without cruelty.

"Marcus will stay outside.

You won't see him, but he'll be there."

I wanted to argue.

I didn't have the energy.

"I need to know something," I said.

"The woman in the photograph.

Elena.

What do you know about what happened to her that night?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"She had a difficult labor.

The baby was early.

They told me Elena developed a complication after delivery — something with her bl00d pressure.

By the time I got to the hospital, she was already gone." His voice stayed level, but his hands tightened on the edge of the desk.

"They were very efficient about it.

Very sorry.

Very certain there was nothing that could have been done."

"Did you believe them?"

He looked at me.

"I believed them because I had a newborn daughter and no one else in the world and I needed something to be simple." He paused.

"I don't believe them anymore."

I went home.

Marcus was a dark car parked across the street that didn't move all night.

I sat on my bed with my daughter's d*ath certificate in my hands.

I had kept it in a shoebox under the bed for two years.

I had never been able to throw it away and never been able to look at it for more than a few seconds.

I looked at it now.

The attending physician's name was printed in the bottom left corner.

Dr.

Raymond Voss.

I typed the name into my phone.

Mercy General's website came up first.

Staff directory.

A headshot of a man in his sixties with silver hair and a careful smile.

I scrolled down.

He had left Mercy General eight months after March fourteenth.

Moved to a private clinic.

The kind of clinic that didn't take insurance.

The kind that had a waiting list and a very quiet reputation and clients whose names never appeared in public records.

I kept scrolling.

The clinic's founding donor was listed in a press release from four years ago.

The name made me sit very still.

Caruso Family Foundation.

I called Damian.

It was past midnight.

He picked up on the first ring.

"Dr.

Raymond Voss," I said.

"He was the attending physician the night our daughters were born.

He left Mercy General eight months later.

He's now at a private clinic."

"I know the clinic," Damian said slowly.

"Your family foundation funded it."

Silence.

"Damian."

"I didn't know that," he said.

"My mother manages the foundation."

The word *mother* landed between us like something neither of us wanted to touch.

"Where does your mother think Leah came from?" I asked carefully.

Another silence.

Longer this time.

"She was there that night," he said.

"At the hospital.

She arrived after Elena d*ed.

She was the one who brought Leah home when I wasn't able to." His voice had changed.

Something underneath it had gone very quiet.

"She handled everything.

The paperwork.

The arrangements.

She said she did it because I was in no condition to."

I didn't say anything.

I didn't need to.

"I'll call you in the morning," he said.

His voice was flat in a way that meant something was happening behind it that he wasn't ready to speak yet.

He ended the call.

I looked at the d*ath certificate again.

At the bottom, beneath Dr.

Voss's printed name, was a second signature.

Smaller.

Witnessed.

I hadn't noticed it before because I had never looked long enough.

The signature read: *V.

Caruso.*