Chapter 102 Adeline
Adeline’s POV
The exhaustion of the Miller-Hayes injunction hung over me like a heavy fog for the next forty-eight hours, but by Thursday afternoon, I finally felt like a human being again.
I was sitting in a sunlit booth at Le Petit, an obscenely expensive French bistro that was obviously chosen by Zara while swirling a glass of sparkling water.
Across the table, Zara was expertly forking and dismantling a plate of salad, looking every inch the flawless Manhattan socialite in a crisp white blazer and oversized sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair. I watched in envy as she forked the salad and ate it without dropping one leaf and smudging her lipstick.
I could only hope to be that graceful.
Sitting at a small table near the door, wearing a sharp black suit and looking completely out of place among the ladies who lunch crowd was Alex. He was currently staring down a waiter who had gotten a little too close to our table.
"I think your shadow is going to make the sommelier cry." I noted mildly, taking a sip of my water.
Zara glanced over her shoulder with a tiny but extremely satisfied smirk playing on her lips. "Alex is just taking his job very seriously. Besides, he looks incredibly handsome when he scowls. I told him he should let me take him shopping for a new tie, but he just grunted at me in Russian. " I gave her a look that she chose to ignore completely.
"Careful, Z," I teased softly. "You're going to break the King's scariest enforcer."
"Good," Zara hummed, stabbing a cherry tomato with her fork. That told me she was taking on a new challenge, and it was to get Alex to smile.
She chewed thoughtfully for a moment before her playful demeanor dimmed a bit. She set her fork down and reached across the table and took her time to dry her dry hands with the linen napkin on the table.
"Zara, are you okay? I was just playing about Alex."
"No, I know."
"You want to tell me what the problem is, then?"
"Actually, Adeline, I wanted to talk to you about the dinner party." Zara started, her voice dropping into a much softer, apologetic one. "I spoke to my mother this morning. She feels absolutely terrible about how she acted when you arrived. She wanted me to apologize again for staring."
The memory of Evelyn Whitmore’s haunted and pale face instantly flashed in my mind, followed immediately by the black and white photograph of Genevieve I had found on the Internet. The same feeling of unease quickly washed over me, but I clamped it down.
"She doesn't need to apologize," I said evenly, keeping my voice light. "We already talked about it. She was under an immense amount of stress. I told Percy the exact same thing."
"It wasn't just the stress, Adeline," Zara corrected sadly. "I know I told you my parents lost a child, but I never actually told you the whole story. Seeing you really threw her off."
I went entirely still at that new information. My fingers tightened around the cool glass in my hand. "Zara, you don't have to explain your family's trauma to me." Yes, I was curious, but I wasn't going to let her relive something that was clearly causing her to be sad.
"I want to," she insisted softly. She took a deep breath, looking down at her hands. "My parents had a baby girl more than twenty-six years ago. She was taken right out of the maternity ward at the hospital. She was my twin sister, actually, but I didn't grow up with her, so I sometimes forget to think of her as an extension of me."
Everything seemed to become distant noise around me as I processed what she had just told me.
I opened my mouth to say anything, but no words came out, so she continued. "The kidnappers left a note demanding a massive ransom. My father was frantic, but he was fully prepared to pay it, but he made the mistake of involving the FBI. The kidnappers got spooked. Before the drop could even be arranged, they vanished. No trace, no clues, nothing. The police searched for years, but my parents never saw her again. That's what I was told."
A strange, erratic flutter started in my chest. More than two decades ago and was kidnapped as a baby. I also happen to look exactly like Evelyn's mother-in-law.
I wondered if those two separate pieces of information had anything to do with each other. As a lawyer, I was trained to spot patterns and connect separate pieces of evidence. This time was no different. I instantly tried to draw a line between Zara's story and my own life.
Ilya Kozlov, a ruthless Russian gang boss, had a daughter with his longtime girlfriend, Mellisa, my own mother. According to my mother, we moved around a lot before I was grown enough to need stability as a child.
Could it be that...? Almost as quickly as the thought formed, my logical mind violently shut it down.
No. It was an insane leap of logic. It was a conspiracy theory built on a stressed woman's grasp and an old photograph. Manhattan was a massive city with millions of people. Many things happened every day, and there were bound to be coincidences among those things.
I was Adeline Volkov. I spoke fluent Russian before I spoke English. I had my father's volatile temper. He was a monster, yes, but he was my monster. He was my father. To think anything else was absolute madness.
"So, when my mother looked at you," Zara said, offering me a sad, empathetic smile, "and saw her mother-in-law's exact bone structure... it just broke something open in her. She’s spent twenty-six years wondering what her daughter would look like today. Plus the fact that she was very close with her mother-in-law, it all just became too much for her, I guess."
I swallowed the lump in my throat and forced the creeping dread back down. I was a lawyer, for crying out loud. I dealt in facts and evidence, not assumptions and coincidences.
"That is horrific, Zara," I whispered, and I meant it. My heart ached for Evelyn. and for Zara, who had grown up in the shadow of such a massive tragedy. I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. There was no way she didn't feel guilty for remaining while her sister was lost. "I am so sorry your family had to go through that. Truly."
"Thank you," Zara sighed and squeezed my hand back. "It was a long time ago, but it still gets to her. Now that she mentioned it, you really do have the Whitmore eyes."
"Well," I forced a small false smile, deliberately steering the conversation away from the dangerous cliff edge. "If I have Whitmore eyes, it just proves my theory that we were destined to be sisters."
Zara’s face instantly lit up, the heavy sadness lifting as she laughed. "Exactly! See, I told you."
We spent the rest of the lunch talking about everything else, and I managed to play my part flawlessly. I laughed at her jokes, ate my salad, and drank my water.
But for some reason, I caught my reflection in the mirror, and I had to convince myself all over again that it was all just a tragic coincidence.