My Son

"He's your son," Matteo said.

Liana heard the words without understanding how to live inside them.

The doctor moved her chair closer. "The results support maternity to a very high degree of certainty, Ms. Graves. We confirmed the sample identities before processing. This child is biologically yours."

Liana looked down.

The baby was chewing the edge of his bib.

"Noah?"

He lifted his face at the sound of her voice.

She touched his eyebrow. The tiny crease there had always deepened when he was concentrating. She had watched him study his own toes with that same serious expression.

"Noah," she said again.

Her whole body folded around him.

He protested at being squeezed, and she loosened her arms at once, laughing through a sound that hurt her throat.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sweetheart."

She didn't know what she was apologizing for first. The coffin. The nights he had cried without her. The fact that she had gone home for clean clothes and left him in a room where someone could decide he belonged to another family.

Noah caught a strand of her hair.

The familiar tug broke whatever was holding her together.

Matteo moved the table before her knees hit it. He guided her onto the sofa, then stepped back.

She barely noticed.

"I came back," she whispered into Noah's hair. "I came back, and they told me you were gone."

The doctor gave her a tissue. Then another.

Noah watched them with growing interest, reaching for the box.

It was such an ordinary thing to want that Liana cried harder.

Eventually she looked up.

Matteo stood beside the window with his copy of the report. He had folded it along the same line three times.

The doctor followed her gaze.

"Mr. Varric's result excludes biological paternity," she said gently. "That tells us about this child's identity. It doesn't establish what happened to the other child."

The other child.

Liana felt the words settle between her ribs.

Matteo nodded once.

"I understand."

But his mouth had gone pale.

The doctor explained the reports again. She offered to remain while they called someone, and arranged for an independent pediatric assessment of Noah's current health. She did not promise anything about the child who had died.

When she left, the room seemed enormous.

Liana wiped Noah's wet chin with her sleeve.

"I don't know what to say to you."

Matteo looked at her then.

"You don't have to make this easier for me."

"I didn't mean—"

"I know what you meant."

The words were quiet. He turned the folded report over in his hand.

"You should call him his name."

She had been holding it in her mouth, afraid every repetition would hurt him.

"He knows your voice too," she said.

Matteo glanced at the baby.

"He's had to learn it."

Liana flinched.

He saw it.

"That wasn't fair. I'm sorry."

She could not tell him she understood. Her son was alive against her chest. There was a selfish, animal joy in her that would not become smaller merely because someone else was hurting.

She hated that she could feel both things at once.

Noah began rubbing his eyes.

"He needs his nap," Matteo said automatically.

Then he stopped, as though he had reached for something that no longer belonged to him.

"Yes," she said. "Will you get his blanket?"

He stood motionless for a second before crossing to the chair.

He knew which blanket.

That hurt too.

In the nursery, Liana lowered Noah into the crib. He immediately reached for her. She sat beside him, stroking his hair through the bars, until he settled.

Matteo remained in the doorway.

"You can come in," she said.

"I don't want you to think I'm going to take him from you."

She looked up sharply.

The fear had been there from the moment the doctor spoke, shameful and practical. Matteo had money, guards, a house full of people who obeyed him. She had a uniform hanging in a guest bathroom and forty-three dollars in her bank account.

He had seen it before she had admitted it to herself.

"I won't," he said. "Daniel is arranging independent advice for you. Someone who represents you, not me."

"I can't afford—"

"You can choose someone else. You can refuse my help. But you shouldn't have to face the hospital alone."

She studied him.

He looked exhausted in a different way now. Not sleepless. Struck.

"What happens to you?" she asked.

For the first time, he had no immediate answer.

He looked at the crib, at the little hand curled beside Noah's face.

"I find my son."

Later that afternoon, Mrs. Bell brought Liana's coat and the bag she had left in the staff cupboard. At the top lay the hospital photograph she had carried everywhere since the funeral.

She stared at it for a long time.

The baby in the photograph had swollen eyelids. A strip of dressing covered the skin behind his ear. She remembered his stillness, the weight of him, her own voice asking why he was cold when there were blankets everywhere.

She had held someone else's son while believing she was saying goodbye to her own.

Matteo came into the sitting room.

"Daniel has found the nurse," he said. "Her name is Evelyn Grant. She contacted Mrs. Bell this morning after Daniel reached an old colleague of hers."

"Mrs. Bell knows her?"

"Apparently, Evelyn recommended you for this job. Mrs. Bell didn't know why. She thought she was helping someone find work."

Liana gripped the photograph.

The job hadn't been an accident.

Evelyn had known where to send her.

"She's agreed to meet us," Matteo continued. "In a place Mercer doesn't control."

Liana stood, then stopped.

She turned the photograph facedown before he could see it clearly.

He looked at her hand.

"You don't have to hide anything from me."

Her eyes burned.

"If Noah came home with you," she said, "where did your Nico go?"

Matteo looked at the back of the photograph.

Neither of them reached to turn it over.