The Silver Star

"Don't call him yet."

Matteo's thumb stopped over the screen.

Liana hadn't meant to sound frightened. Now that she had heard herself, she could not pretend otherwise.

"I don't know what I'm suggesting," she said. "I just need to think before someone tells me I'm confused."

He set the phone down.

"Tell me what happened."

She clasped her hands tightly enough to hurt.

Noah had been improving. She had gone home for clean clothes after a nurse promised to call if anything changed. Before dawn, Mercer had called instead. There had been a sudden deterioration. They had tried to reach her. They had done everything.

"By the time I arrived, he was already gone."

Matteo waited.

"They let me hold him. He was wrapped up, and his face was swollen. There were marks from the tape. I kept saying he looked different."

Her voice grew quieter.

"The nurse told me that could happen after treatment. I didn't want to believe any of it. I thought that was why I couldn't recognize him properly."

She remembered searching for his scar. A dressing had covered the side of his head. She had asked to remove it. Mercer had said she should remember her son as he had been.

She had hated him for that kindness.

Now she wondered whether it had been kindness at all.

"Did anyone else identify him?" Matteo asked.

"My mother died when I was nineteen. Noah's father left before he was born. There wasn't anyone else."

Matteo's expression tightened, but he did not pity her aloud.

"Daniel can request the transport records without involving Mercer," he said. "And we can speak to a doctor who doesn't work for that hospital."

"What if I'm doing this because I miss him?"

He leaned forward.

"Then we find that out carefully. I won't let anyone humiliate you for asking."

She could not answer.

Daniel arrived the next morning carrying a laptop. Broad-shouldered, gray at the temples, he introduced himself to Liana instead of looking past her.

He had obtained Matteo's discharge paperwork from the family office and Liana's copies with her permission. The transport company was the same. Two infant transfers had been logged twenty-five days earlier, one to the Varric estate and one to the hospital mortuary.

"That doesn't prove an error," Daniel said. "But there are duplicate corrections on the dispatch sheet. I've asked the company to preserve the originals."

Liana looked through her photographs of Noah.

In one, he was laughing around the corner of a washcloth. In another, asleep against her shoulder. Matteo studied them without offering a verdict based on resemblance.

She was grateful for that too.

Then Daniel mentioned the woman who had entered the estate three weeks earlier.

Liana looked up.

Matteo's jaw tightened.

"Someone used a forged agency badge. She reached the nursery before we caught the access mismatch."

"What did she do?"

"She fled before the guards reached her. Nico was awake when they went in."

"You think she tried to take him."

"I thought that was the only explanation."

Daniel opened the recording.

A woman in a hood crossed the nursery. She leaned over the crib and touched the baby's hair. Her shoulders shook once. Then she knelt and worked at the removable padded liner near the head of the bed.

Liana moved closer to the screen.

The woman turned toward the door when a light flashed. She was gone seconds later.

"Did you search the liner?" Liana asked.

"We removed the mattress and inspected the frame," Matteo said.

"She isn't reaching under the mattress. Look at her fingers."

Daniel replayed the movement.

Matteo was already walking toward the crib.

They put Nico on a blanket with Mrs. Bell while Matteo unfastened the liner. Along the underside, an inch of stitching had been cut and loosely closed with white thread.

He pressed gently along the padding.

Something small shifted inside.

Liana knew what it was before he opened the seam.

A silver star dropped into his palm.

"Please let me see the clasp," she said.

Matteo held it out.

There was the tiny kink she had made with borrowed pliers when the fastening broke. There were the letters N.G. scratched into the back by the jeweler who had told her proper engraving would cost more than she could afford.

Liana covered her mouth.

She had not let Noah wear the pendant. It had hung on the outside of his hospital bag, where he could not reach it. After his death, she had asked for it to be placed in the coffin beneath his folded blanket.

The funeral director had assured her the sealed belongings packet had gone with him.

She had believed that assurance too.

"This was supposed to be buried," she said.

Matteo's fingers closed around the star.

"Are you certain it's yours?"

"I broke the clasp trying to fix it. I scratched my thumb on that edge."

She showed him the place.

No one told her it was a coincidence.

Daniel stepped into the hall to make another call.

Matteo stood very still.

"We need an answer that can't be changed by a missing necklace," he said.

Liana looked toward the baby on the blanket.

He had rolled onto his side to watch her.

"You mean a test."

"If you agree. An independent laboratory. Proper identification and collection. Both of us."

She imagined allowing herself to hope, then losing Noah a second time.

Her legs felt cold.

"I don't think I can survive being wrong."

Matteo's voice roughened.

"I don't think either of us can keep pretending we haven't asked the question."

They collected the samples that afternoon.

Over the next two days, Liana slept in a guest room close to the nursery. She fed the baby. Changed him. Kept calling him Nico, because wanting another name did not make it his.

Matteo stayed nearby without demanding gratitude.

On the third morning, the laboratory doctor arrived with the results.

She asked whether they wanted to receive them together.

Liana nodded. Matteo did too.

He opened his copy first.

She saw the moment he understood.

His hand became motionless on the paper.

"Matteo," she whispered.

He looked at the child in her arms.

Then he looked at her, and she knew the answer had cost him something she could not yet bear to name.