Chapter 5: The Father of My Child

“He told you that?”

Mara nodded.

“Before your examination. He wanted the records to give a later conception date. I kept the original ultrasound report.”

She pulled a thinner folder from the bag.

I didn’t reach for it immediately.

Lorenzo stood by the steel door. Matteo checked the corridor through the narrow viewing panel. Nobody tried to make this conversation easier by leaving me alone with the doctor who had helped ruin my life.

“He said I was confused about the dates,” I whispered.

“He wanted you to be.”

For months, Danny had insisted that I couldn’t know. Periods were unreliable. Doctors knew better. I was upset after the funeral. I was remembering things wrong.

Every time I said Ethan’s name, he became angry enough that I stopped saying it.

But I remembered Ethan.

The veterinary surgeon had come to our Kentucky farm to help with a mare whose leg wouldn’t heal. He stayed three weeks because my grandfather couldn’t pay for another visit and Ethan refused to leave the animal suffering.

He slept in the spare room, drank terrible coffee without complaining, and fixed the loose step Grandpa kept promising to repair.

I had known him before Danny returned to my life.

There was nothing uncertain about the nights we spent together.

“Ethan Cole,” I said.

Lorenzo looked at me.

“He’s a vet. He went overseas with a rescue organization. I was supposed to join him after we settled the farm. Then Grandpa got sick.”

I took the original report.

The dates matched the thing I had known before somebody taught me to doubt it.

I lowered myself onto the chair.

“Danny came back after the funeral. He said Ethan had forgotten me. He showed me messages.”

“From Ethan?” Matteo asked.

“That’s what he said. I never saw the account. Just pictures on his phone.”

Mara placed a folded page beside my hand.

“I copied Danny’s intake statement before Dritan removed it. He identified himself as your partner, then told me privately that the father was abroad. He wanted that kept out of your chart.”

I read it.

There was Danny’s actual signature. The same flourish he had failed to reproduce on mine.

“He knew,” I said.

Nobody answered. Nobody needed to.

The door shuddered under a distant impact. Matteo checked his radio, turned the volume low, and listened to a burst of voices.

“They haven’t reached this end,” he told Lorenzo. “But the main tunnel is compromised.”

I put the report with the other papers.

“Where’s Danny now?”

Mara looked down.

Matteo answered.

“Dead. About three months ago.”

My eyes went to him.

“Dritan?”

“That’s what we’ve been able to establish.”

Three months. Almost exactly as long as I’d been running.

I thought of the phone calls from unfamiliar numbers. The messages telling me Danny would find me, that he was furious, that I could still come back if I behaved.

Some of them had arrived after he died.

“They kept using him,” I said. “They wanted me frightened of somebody who wasn’t even alive.”

Lorenzo’s face hardened.

I waited for grief, or guilt about not grieving.

What came instead was exhaustion. Danny had been many things to me, once. A boy from a neighboring town. A familiar face when my family was gone. Eventually, the sound of a key turning outside a locked door.

I couldn’t mourn all those people at once.

“I want to contact Ethan,” I said.

“We will,” Lorenzo answered.

“I wasn’t asking you to contact him for me. I need a phone that works.”

Matteo held out his.

“No signal down here. Keep it until we reach the surface.”

I took it.

That small act nearly undid me. A phone placed in my hand without a condition attached.

Lorenzo stepped toward the chair.

“Nora, I didn’t know about Danny and the child. Mara was still explaining when—”

“When you decided to keep explaining without me?”

He stopped.

“You had a photograph of my mother. You had a report with my name on it. You watched me work in your house.”

“I was afraid it was another attempt to reach me.”

“So you protected yourself.”

He didn’t look away.

“Yes.”

I had expected a justification. Hearing him admit it left me with nowhere easy to put my anger.

“I don’t know you,” I said. “I can’t become your daughter because a doctor hands me a piece of paper.”

“You don’t have to become anything.”

“Then stop deciding where I belong.”

He nodded once, slowly.

Mara moved beside me with a small handheld monitor.

“May I check the baby? You fell in the courtyard.”

I hesitated, then lifted the edge of my blouse.

She worked quickly. The room filled with a rapid, steady beat.

I gripped the chair until my fingers hurt.

Lorenzo stared at the little machine.

Mara finished, explained that I would need a proper examination when we were out, and offered a bottle of water. I drank half before realizing how thirsty I was.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

“I can walk.”

“Tell me if the pain changes.”

Matteo came away from the door.

“The route we came through is blocked. There’s smoke near the ramp.”

Lorenzo looked at the ceiling panel.

“We could use the maintenance corridor.”

“Not with her,” Matteo said. “There are ladders.”

I stood and went to Balthazar. Lorenzo opened the inner door to the recessed delivery passage, keeping the outer security door locked.

The horse pushed his muzzle against my arm. I rubbed his forehead and checked the wound beneath his jaw. It had stopped bleeding heavily.

Something cool brushed the side of my face.

I turned.

There shouldn’t have been a breeze underground.

I walked back into the room, following it past the bed. A strip of paper taped to a cabinet stirred when I moved my hand away.

“What’s behind this wall?”

“Earth,” Lorenzo said. “The old chapel is above the slope.”

“There’s air coming through.”

He approached the cabinet.

“There was a passage. It was sealed before this room was converted.”

I crouched enough to examine the floor, holding the bed frame for balance. Beneath the cabinet, pale scratches curved across the stone.

Someone had moved it recently.

“Your sealed passage has been opened,” I said.

Matteo and Lorenzo shifted the cabinet. Behind it, a narrow vertical seam divided the wall. Near the bottom was a metal ring, painted to match the stone.

I pointed.

“My grandfather had an old feed room with a door like that. It wasn’t hidden. People just kept stacking things in front of it.”

Lorenzo pulled the ring. Nothing happened.

Matteo pressed his shoulder against the other edge.

The stone-faced door moved inward, spilling cold air across our feet.

Beyond it lay a sloping passage wide enough for a cart.

I looked at Lorenzo.

“Now we have somewhere to go.”