together.
Mr.
Zarate’s voice changed immediately.
‘What is it? What happened?’
She tried to speak, but no sound came out.
The man in the wheelchair looked at her with the same cold stare he had worn a minute ago, but now there was something else beneath it.
Confusion.
Suspicion.
A flicker of fear.
Paloma lifted one shaking hand and pointed at the chain.
‘Where did you get that?’ she whispered.
His jaw tightened.
‘It was mine.’
The answer made her cry harder.
‘No,’ she said, struggling to breathe.
‘It belonged to Tomas.’
The name hit the room like a dropped glass.
He went still.
Really still.
Paloma watched the color drain from his face, watched his fingers curl slowly against the armrest as if his body had recognized the word before his mind could catch up.
For the first time since she arrived, the contempt was gone from his expression.
‘No one calls me that,’ he said quietly.
That was when the door opened.
The elegant older woman from the cafe stood there, one hand pressed against the frame, her silver hair catching the bathroom light.
Up close, she looked even more composed than before.
But her face had gone pale.
‘Adrian,’ she said softly, though her voice shook, ‘give her a minute.’
Paloma stared at her through tears.
‘You know him?’
The woman closed her eyes for a beat, then looked at Paloma with a sadness that seemed older than the house itself.
‘I know what the records say,’ she answered.
‘And I know what the boy who came to me had on him the night we found him.
I did not know there was a sister.’
Paloma’s breath caught.
‘Found him?’
The woman stepped farther into the room and lowered herself into the chair nearest the door, suddenly looking tired in a way no amount of wealth could hide.
‘Years ago, after the crash, he was brought to the hospital with no memory and no family able to be reached.
His name was listed under another file before we ever met him.
He was a child with no clear past and no one to claim him.
I took him in.
I gave him my name because I believed he had lost everything.’
Paloma stared at the billionaire in the wheelchair, the man she had been told to wash, the man who barked orders and looked at the world like it had personally betrayed him.
A boy from a storm.
A boy with a silver chain.
A boy who had vanished.
‘You were Tomas,’ she said, almost to herself.
His eyes were fixed on her face now, and something in them was beginning to crack.
‘I remember rain,’ he said after a long silence.
‘And a little girl’s voice.
I never knew why.’
Paloma laughed once through her tears, a broken sound that held twenty years of grief.
‘Because that little girl was me.’
The room went so quiet that even the water seemed to stop moving.
Mrs.
Zarate, who had looked elegant and untouchable an hour earlier, pressed her lips together hard.
‘We should not do this only on memory,’ she said, voice unsteady.
‘We will do a test.
Tonight.’
They did.
And when the results came back, the paper said what Paloma had already felt in her
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