“In the aftermath,” Odette replied, “I was rather more concerned with the change in Tobias and the reason for that change.”
Alice.
“Tell me,” Lyra said, her voice breaking. “Anything you know, anything you suspect, anything you’ve held back—I need to know.”
A look of understanding cross Odette’s features then. “Do you remember what I told you about love, Lyra?”
“You called it a strange and wild beast.” It hurt to even say the words. “A gift and a comfort and a curse.”
“I was not wrong, was I, Ms. Kane? About you and your Hawthorne.”
Lyra’s throat tightened. She had no intention of answering Odette’s question, but somehow, her lips parted. “Love is real.” Lyra didn’t owe Odette more than that, didn’t even owe herthat, but the words just kept coming. “It’s knowing who you are and who the other person is and letting go, letting yourself fall, knowing damn well that there’s someone there to catch you.”
“Love is agony.”
“Right now—yes.”
“But you’d do it all again.”
Lyra’s eyes stung as she pressed her lips together, just for a moment.“Yes.”
“And so would I,” Odette told her. “All those lives I’ve lived, every mistake I’ve made, every person I’ve loved, every person I’ve been—all of it means that Ilived.”
Lyra heard in those words something she hadn’t realized before. “Past tense.”
“I’m ready,” Odette told her. “Or almost ready.”
“Why Italy?” Lyra asked. “And why did you ask to speak to me?”
“Those are the exact right questions. Well done, Ms. Kane.”
“Answer them, then.”
“I read lips. Quite well, actually. And I once was in position to watch the first dance between a Hawthorne boy and a girl who despised him. He couldn’t take his eyes off you, nor you him, and he told you about a file.”
“My father’s file.” Except it hadn’t been, not really.
“Thomas, Thomas,” Odette said. “All those years ago, when I was fixing Alice’s mess, not knowing that it was hers, not knowing that Tobias was still hers—body, mind, and soul—he asked me to do one more thing for him. It involved setting up a fairly rudimentary trust and acquiringproperty in a coastal town in Italy, a town on the Adriatic Sea. I thought nothing of it at the time, didn’t even connect it to the rest, but after I last spoke to you and Grayson, after I decided it would be prudent to disappear, I just couldn’t stop thinking aboutThomas, Thomas. And it eventually occurred to me that perhaps the most famous Thomas was the one known for his doubts.”
“Doubting Thomas,” Lyra said.
“Saint Thomas to Catholics,” Odette replied. “And do you know where the relics of Saint Thomas are held? Where the Basilica of San Tommaso Apostolo is?”
Lyra saw exactly where this was headed. “Italy. A coastal town on the Adriatic Sea.”
“I knew very little about the situation I fixed,” Odette replied, “but it turns out that I did know my Hawthorne, my Tobias, at least a little. Enough to know that I would find something here.”
It was probably too late for anything she’d found to matter, too late for Lyra to be able todoanything. But still, she had to ask: “What did you find?”
“Not what, Ms. Kane.Who.”
Chapter 87
LYRA
Little Lyra, all grown up.”
Lyra stared at the screen on her phone. At the man responsible for half her DNA, who, unlike his brother, pronounced her name the right way—but also didn’t put any more emphasis on it than he would on any other word. Her father hadn’t aged nearly as much as he should have. Even at first glance, he reminded Lyra of the kind of actor who got more roles at forty than at twenty, the kind whose charm aged like wine.