Chapter 60

Alejandro’s POV

Reeves came back some days later.  Same restaurant, same corner booth, same glass of tap water he ordered and didn’t touch.

He sat down, placed a sealed envelope on the table between us, and folded his hands over it with the unhurried patience of a man who understood that what he was about to hand over needed a moment before it moved.

“Medical records were harder than anticipated,” he began, his voice low and even. “Whoever her doctor is runs a tight operation. What I have is partial but it’s enough to tell you something is going on that she hasn’t disclosed to anyone outside her immediate circle.”

My jaw tightened slightly. “How serious?”

“I can’t give you a diagnosis, I’m not qualified for that,” he replied carefully, “but the frequency of her hospital visits over the last eight months and the specialist she’s been seeing tells its own story. Cardiology. High level.”

The word landed in my chest and sat there.

“The rest of it,” he continued, nodding toward the envelope, “is more complete. Full employment history, every establishment, names she used, dates. Her mother’s records which were interesting on their own. And something at the back that I wasn’t looking for but found anyway.”

I picked up the envelope.

“The mother,” he said, standing and buttoning his jacket. “Look at the last three pages. That’s where it gets complicated.”

He left his water untouched again.

I sat there alone in the corner booth with the envelope in my hands and the word cardiology sitting somewhere behind my ribs and did not open it for a full five minutes.

I took it home instead of reading it there.

Candy was out, dinner with her mother apparently, something my housekeeper told me with the careful neutrality of a woman who had learned to deliver information in this house without attaching opinions to it.

I thanked her, went directly to my office,  closed the door and sat in the leather chair behind my desk with all the lights on because for some reason the idea of reading this in dim light felt wrong.

I opened the envelope.

The photographs came first.

It was more than my father’s file had contained. Clearer, more detailed, a more complete picture of the years my father’s version had only sketched the outline of.

Mira on a stage whose name I now knew, younger and harder faced than the woman I’d watched steal fruit from my kitchen at midnight like she thought she was invisible. Shift records spanning two establishments. A third I hadn’t known about, shorter tenure, only four months, the dates landing right after the withdrawn police report which told me enough about the reason she’d moved on without anyone having to explain it.

I put the photographs face down, took a breath, then kept reading.

Her stepfather’s full history was worse than my father’s file had suggested. Court records from before Mira. A pattern that predated her by years, which meant Flora Martinez had either not known or not wanted to know, and neither option reflected well on anyone. I read through it with my teeth pressed together and set those pages aside too.

Then the mother.

I turned to the last three pages like Reeves had told me to and I read them once quickly and then sat back in my chair and stared at the ceiling for a long moment before reading them again slowly.

Flora Martinez, reported dead years ago. The plane malfunctioned over open water, and no body was recovered, the kind of tragedy that closed cases quickly because there was nothing to contradict the obvious conclusion. Mira believed she was dead. The world believed she was dead.

Except, there  was a woman living in Millhaven under the name Flora Reyes, which wasn’t even a particularly creative alias, who had appeared in that city’s hospital system approximately years ago with severe trauma and complete memory loss, no identification, no next of kin located.

She’d been in state care for three months before a private individual had taken over her medical costs, someone connected to the Reyes family apparently, which explained the name.

The physical description matched.

The age matched.

There was even a photograph, low quality, taken at some community event she’d apparently attended, and I held it under my desk lamp, looking at it for a long time.

I didn’t know Flora Martinez.

I had never met her, never seen a photograph of her, had no reference point beyond Mira’s face, and Mira’s face was enough.

The resemblance was not subtle.

I put the pages down on my desk and sat there in the silence of my office and thought about Mira on Zara’s couch, wherever she was right now at this hour, carrying the belief that her mother was dead alongside whatever was happening with her health alongside the fallout from the gala alongside all the things she’d been carrying long before I ever entered her life.

I opened my desk drawer.

Took out the bottle I kept there for the specific category of evenings that didn’t suit anything else.

I poured one glass and drank it standing at my window, looking out at the city doing its nighttime thing below, all those lights that never fully went out.

The thing about this information, all of it stacked together, was that it didn’t make me want her less. That was the part I suspected my father had never anticipated when he’d commissioned these investigations.

He had assumed that knowledge of her past would function as a wall, something I would look at and step back from. He had fundamentally misunderstood both of us.

What it actually did was make me feel something dangerously close to furious on her behalf.

Every single page of that file was a document of what happened to a person when they had nobody in their corner. No father who stayed. No mother who could protect her. No safety net of any kind, just a girl making increasingly desperate calculations about how to survive the next thing.

And now she was on Zara’s couch thinking I had known about the gala announcement, which I hadn’t, and thinking I had known about the file, which I had but not in the way she probably imagined it.

I wanted to call her. I wanted to call her the way you wanted air when something was sitting on your chest, immediate and necessary and not optional. But I didn’t have the full picture yet and showing up half informed with Reeves’s photographs and my father’s file and a head full of things she hadn’t chosen to tell me yet would be exactly the wrong move.

I needed to find Flora Martinez first.

I needed to understand the medical situation before I walked back into her life and said everything I needed to say.

I needed to be someone worth coming back to when she finally decided to come back.

I poured a second glass and didn’t drink it but just looked at it.

Her mother was somewhere in Millhaven who went to community events under a borrowed name and didn’t know she had a daughter who thought she was dead.

“What else are you carrying,” I said quietly to the empty room.

The city lights didn’t answer.

Neither did she.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​