Chapter 71

Chapter 71


Mira’s POV

Dro picked up on the first ring.

“Mira.”

Just my name, and the way he said it, like he’d been waiting for it, undid something in me before the conversation had even started.

“Tell me what you found,” I said. My voice came out steadier than my hands looked.

“Are you sitting down?” He questioned.

“Alejandro.” I rolled my eyes.

“Are you?”

“Yes,” I lied. I was pacing the length of Zara’s small bedroom in four steps each direction. “Talk.”

There was a brief pause like he was organizing something.

“Her name right now is Flora Reyes,” he began carefully. “She’s been living in Millhaven for years. She was admitted to a hospital there after the crash—” Another pause. “She survived, Mira. The plane went down but she survived it. She was found with severe trauma and no identification and by the time anyone connected the dots the case had already been closed.”

I stopped pacing.

“She’s been there this whole time?” I asked quietly.

“Yes.”

“Alive and well?”

“Yes.”

I pressed my free hand flat against the wall beside me because standing suddenly felt like something that required external support.

“Why didn’t anyone find her?” I asked, and I hated how small my voice sounded asking it.

“The memory loss,” he replied gently. “She couldn’t tell them who she was. There was nobody on her end pushing the investigation because everyone believed she was dead. It just—” He exhaled. “It fell through every crack available to it.”

I closed my eyes.

My mother had been alive in a city two hours away while I stood at an empty grave and learned how to carry grief like a permanent piece of luggage and told myself that some people just didn’t get to keep the people they loved.

“Does she remember?” I managed. “Anything. Does she remember me?”

The pause before his answer was a fraction too long.

“Alejandro.” I called.

“She’s been recovering,” he said carefully. “Memory loss like this isn’t straightforward. It comes back in pieces, not all at once—”

“Does she remember me?” I repeated, and this time there was nothing steady about it.

“I don’t know yet,” he admitted quietly. “I haven’t made contact. I didn’t think that was my place.”

Something in my chest cracked open in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

He hadn’t gone to her. He’d found her and sat on the information and waited for me, which was either the most considerate thing anyone had ever done for me or the most devastating depending on which angle I looked at it from, and right now I was looking at it from approximately seven angles simultaneously.

“Send me what you have,” I said.

“Mira, I think we should talk about how you want to approach—”

“Send me what you have,” I repeated. “Please.” I begged. 

“Okay. But I need you to hear something first.”

I waited for him to speak. 

“Whatever you find when you get to her,” he said quietly, “whatever she remembers or doesn’t remember,  it doesn’t change anything about who you are. You were who you were before she disappeared and you’ve been that person every day since without her. I need you to know that before you walk into something that might not look the way you need it to.”

I stood there in the silence of Zara’s bedroom and felt something move through me that was too complicated and too large to examine in this moment so I filed it away later.

“You sound like you know something I don’t,” I muttered carefully.

“I’m just being honest,” he replied.

“You’re being careful,” I corrected. “Which with you usually means the same thing.”

He didn’t answer that.

Which was its own kind of answer.

“Send me the information,” I asked again. “And Alejandro—” I stopped taking in a deep breath. 

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.” The words came out rough at the edges. 

“For looking. For not just—” I swallowed. “Thank you.”

“Mira.” His voice was low and certain. “There is nothing I wouldn’t look for if it mattered to you.”

I pressed my lips together hard.

“Goodnight,” I said before he could say anything else that would dismantle me further.

“Goodnight.”

I ended the call and stood very still for a moment.

Then the tears came.

Not the dramatic type, not the kind that announced themselves. Just quiet and continuous, standing there in the dark of Zara’s bedroom with my phone in my hand and my mother alive in a city two hours away who may or may not remember my name.

My phone buzzed.

Alejandro had sent a file and a photograph was attached at the bottom.

I opened it with unsteady fingers and held the screen close looking at the woman in it.

She was at some kind of outdoor event, slightly blurred the way candid photographs taken from a distance always were, but clear enough. She was thinner than I remembered. Her hair was different, shorter, and there were lines in her face that hadn’t been there before.

But her hands.

She was holding a cup with both hands, the way I always held mine, wrapped around it like she was cold even in the sun, and I recognized that so completely and so instantly that something in my chest simply gave way.

“Mira?”

Zara appeared in the doorway.

She took one look at my face and crossed the room without a word, sitting beside me on the bed and wrapping both arms around me from behind and just holding on.

I showed her the photograph and she looked at it for a long moment.

“Oh baby,” Zara said softly.

“She holds her cup the same way I do,” I chuckled dryly, which was a ridiculous thing to focus on and the only thing I could say without falling apart entirely.

Zara held tighter.

We sat there for a while, the room dark and quiet around us, and I looked at that photograph thinking about twelve days, Switzerland, the surgery slot and everything happening simultaneously in a life that had apparently decided to resolve all of its outstanding issues at once.

“What are you going to do?”  Zara asked eventually.

“I don’t know yet.”

“About all of it. Harrington, your mum, Alejandro—”

“I know what ‘all of it’ means, Zara.”

“I’m just checking you do.” She rested her chin on my shoulder, both of us looking at the phone screen together. “Because from where I’m sitting it looks like everything is moving at once and you’re standing very still in the middle of it.”

“I’m thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking for months,” she said gently. “At some point thinking becomes hiding.”

I looked at my mother’s hands around that cup.

“I need to go to Millhaven,” I said.

Zara was quiet for a beat.

“When?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she responded simply.

“You’re not coming.” I stared at her.

“I absolutely am.” She grinned. 

“Zara—”

“Try and stop me.” She sat back, already decisive. “I’ll drive, you navigate, we leave at eight before you have time to change your mind.” She stood up and pointed at me with the authority of someone who had made a decision on behalf of another person and considered the matter settled. “Sleep. Actual sleep, not couch staring. You have a mother to find tomorrow.”

She left before I could argue.

I looked at the photograph one more time.

Thought about Alejandro’s voice.

There is nothing I wouldn’t look for if it was impossible to you.

Then I thought about Ace’s text still unanswered on my phone, and the surgery slot, and twelve days, and the fact that my body had a deadline that none of the other things on my list were aware of or particularly interested in accommodating.

I lay back on the bed fully clothed staring at the ceiling.

Tomorrow, I thought but I couldn’t shake the thought that my own mother wouldn’t remember me. 

What if she looks at me and feels nothing?