Page 12 of Nightfire

She’d known in an instant what was going on. Though she hadn’t had sex, had never kissed a boy, had never even touched a boy, she’d read enough and anyway, instinctively, she knew. Knew that his red face, flaring nostrils and wild animal scent meant trouble. It had come from some place deep inside of her. Through her reading, she even knew what the tent in front of his linen trousers meant. An erection.

She’d gone into overdrive, kicking and screaming, grabbing a brass candlestick and bashing him in the face with it. His look of astonishment would have been comical if she hadn’t been so desperate. Weak, sick Chloe, fighting back. She’d shocked even herself.

Her rebellion hadn’t lasted long, though.

“He broke my arm,” she said. “It had been operated on recently and it broke easily.” Cheap at the price, because he’d stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her, cradling her visibly-broken arm.

Harry Bolt suddenly looked sick. Mike Keillor looked furious.

“My mother walked in and without a word to my father, took me back to the hospital, told them I fell down, and left me there overnight. The next day, cast and all, I was on a flight to London, where I was enrolled in the Sacred Heart School for Young Girls, where I boarded for the next three years.”

Chloe smiled. She had no idea if her mother had checked up on the Sacred Heart, if there had been some kind of parents’ site giving ratings of schools for foreign girls, or whether her mother had simply thrown a dart at a page of choices. Whatever, she’d struck pure gold. The years at the Sacred Heart had been the happiest of her life, hands down. The nuns had been warm and welcoming, the other girls from all over the world had provided friendship and she’d felt at home for the first time in her life.

“I stayed in England, went to university at University College London. When I graduated, I found a job back at the Sacred Heart, teaching English. I never saw my parents again. My mother and I emailed from time to time, and sometimes she talked about coming over to London, but she never did.”

She’d sent money, though. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, which Chloe had dutifully banked, spending as little of it as possible. She liked pretty clothes but she didn’t need a huge wardrobe. Her tastes were simple and the account grew and grew.

She glanced down at her wristwatch. She’d been talking for half an hour.

“I’m really sorry,” she said, looking up. “I know I’m taking up your time but I needed to say all of that, so you’d—you’d understand.”

Again, it was Michael Keillor—Mike—who spoke. “Oh, we understand all right,” he said grimly. He shot Harry a hard glance. “Don’t we?”

Harry Bolt shook his head. Not the ‘no’ gesture, it was more like shaking himself awake.

Okay. So far, so good. Chloe’s hands started shaking again because…it was time. Her life was going to split in two. If this went well…

Don’t go there. Think of something else.

But somehow her usual trick of dampening expectations wasn’t working. Hope had caught her heart in an unshakeable iron grip. While recounting her past, she’d used the old distancing trick, talking about herself as if recounting the story of a remote acquaintance.

Now the story grew closer, more personal. Possibly with a terrifying ending. Possibly with a joyful one.

She leaned forward a little and so did the two men. Like a group of conspirators, hatching a subversive plot.

“As I said, I never saw my parents again and we communicated rarely. So…I had no idea that they’d died in a car crash. On the 18th of April of this year. It took my, um, my father’s lawyer almost a month to track me down. It was end of term at my school so I flew over to—to settle my parents’ affairs.”

The crumpled envelope on her lap felt like it was filled with bricks. Heavy, lumpy, cumbersome.

The closer she got to the heart of it, the harder it was to breathe. Something squeezed inside her chest. She watched Harry Bolt’s eyes, light golden brown, watching her.

“My father hadn’t left me anything in his will, which didn’t surprise me. However, my mother outlived him by three hours and she was his sole heir and I was her sole heir, so the entire estate came to me. Settling the estate was complicated, but I had lawyers and time and a place to stay—their house. Since I was there, I explored. It was a brand-new house. Yet again, one I’d never seen. I gave notice at my school because this was important. I spent all my time sifting through papers and books and objects, trying to get a handle on my parents, trying to get a handle on my past. I took my time because it seemed to me that it was an opportunity to find out things that had puzzled me all my life.”

She stopped and simply breathed. Her entire life arrowed toward this point and she, who thought out everything so carefully, who tried to anticipate all problems, had no idea what was coming next.

“There was a safe, a big one, like one of those safes in the movies. There was no way I could open it. But the lawyer told me I had a right to have it opened. He gave me the name of an expert. A man who’d done time as a safecracker and was now a ‘security consultant.’ A man you hired to crack into safes, legally.”

She smiled faintly at the memory. Luigi Zampilli, a short fireplug of a man with the hands of a neurosurgeon. Ten thousand dollars and the safe was open in five minutes.

The two men were staring at her. It was getting harder and harder to speak. She finished her tea to moisten her throat, wishing she could fast forward to a quarter of an hour from now when she’d told it all and knew what the reaction was.

“Inside—inside the safe were several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Treasury bonds, ten pounds of gold ingots, the title to a number of properties I had no idea they owned…and a black box full of documents.”

With a shaking hand, Chloe placed the manila envelope on Harry Bolt’s desk and stared at it. Her life in an envelope. She lifted her eyes to his, so like her own.

“I was adopted,” she said finally, swallowing heavily. “I had no idea, none. When I saw the adoption certificate, I felt like someone had hit me on the side of the head. I was frightened and relieved at the same time, because those two people were not my biological mother and father. I think at that moment I realized I wasn’t a monster because I couldn’t love my parents. Simply couldn’t, much as I wanted to, because there was nothing there to love.”

She’d been so shocked she’d simply sat in an armchair throughout a long day and night, sifting through her memories, letting them fall like the elements of a kaleidoscope into a new pattern, one that made more sense to her, where the old one had made no sense to her at all.