it doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“I didn’t say that.” She stared at the picture. It was dearly familiar, although she hadn’t seen it in more than thirty years. “This was mine when I was a little girl,” she said.
“What?”
“Mine, Jake. The locket was given to me by a friend of my mother’s when I still lived in New Orleans, and she put her own picture inside.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
“If it was yours, why did Aurore Gerritsen have it when she died?”
“That’s another story.”
He didn’t ask her to tell it. He fell silent, but both arms crept around her again.
Nicky felt tears welling up, although she hadn’t cried since opening the box. She snapped the locket shut and slipped it back around her neck. “I need some answers. Will you find Dawn and send her in here?”
“You think she’s going to tell you anything?”
“I’m going on instinct. What else can I do?”
He hugged her hard enough to force the air from her lungs. He always resorted to strength when he was most vulnerable.
She felt the absence of his arms once he’d gone, but she steeled herself for what was to come. She didn’t have to wait long. There was a knock, and Dawn opened the door. “Nicky?”
“Come on in.”
“Jake said—”
“I want you to look at a picture and tell me if you know who it is.”
“Of course.” Dawn approached slowly. “Are you all right?”
“No. Are you?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ve all got that much in common.” Nicky slid her fingers over the locket. She hesitated and looked back up at Dawn. “Have you ever seen this before?”
“I don’t think so.”
Nicky opened the locket. “And this woman?”
Dawn gazed at the photograph for a moment, then at Nicky. “My grandmother when she was young.”
Nicky snapped the locket shut. She turned away.
“Would you like me to leave?” Dawn asked softly.
“She never told me she was my mother. When I was a little girl, your grandmother held me on her lap and brought me presents. She told me she had known my mother, but she never told me who she really was.”
“Oh, God.” Dawn sat down on the bed beside her.
“I saw her twice, I think, although I’m not sure, be cause it was so long ago. I know I saw her right before my father and I left for Chicago, and she gave me this locket.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve, I think. And that was the last time I ever saw her. Because I didn’t come back to New Orleans until a few years ago. My father was killed in Chicago. An old man named Clarence Valentine saw the whole thing. He was like a grandfather to me, and afterwards he was afraid for my life. He was a jazz pianist, and he was on his way to Paris, to play in a club in Montmartre. So he smuggled me out of the city and took me with him.”
“How was your father killed, or don’t you want to talk about it?”
“There was a riot, black against white. He was gunned down. I got a good look at the face of the man who did it. And Clarence was afraid that because I had, the man might come after me, too. So we left the country, and I started a new life.”
“Clarence Valentine. That’s where the Valentine comes from.”
“What did Phillip tell you about my father?”
Dawn was silent, as if she would rather not say what conclusions she’d drawn.
“Did he tell you that after everything, after my father had ruined Aurore’s family and taken me from her arms, and even after she had married Henry Gerritsen, they still couldn’t forget each other?”
“Raphael and my grandmother?”
“Not Raphael. He called himself Rafe by then. That’s how I remember him. Phillip says that years later Aurore discovered why my father had done the things he had. She found the letters that you read last night, and she figured out the truth. And when she confronted my father, he told her everything. For the first time, she understood it all. And she understood something even more frightening. Despite their years apart, despite everything they had done to hurt each other, he still loved her, and she still loved him.”
Nicky looked up. “Both of them knew how impossible it was. Everything in the world stood between them. But they loved each other anyway. Against all the odds. And that’s why my father took me and left the city. Be cause their love would have doomed them both.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” Dawn said at last.
“Phillip tells me that Aurore believed I died in the riot, along with my father. She was told that I had, and all her investigations seemed to prove that I hadn’t survived. By then I was in Paris, but she didn’t know.”
Nicky stopped. She wondered why she was telling this to Dawn. She turned, not knowing what she would see on Dawn’s face. Dawn lifted her hand and tentatively covered Nicky’s. “I can’t believe that she didn’t love you, Nicky. I knew her, as well as anyone in the world did. And I know that she wouldn’t ever have for gotten her own child or stopped loving you. Maybe she thought she didn’t have any choice, but she must have felt so guilty. The things she did must have stayed with her until the day she died. That’s why she couldn’t tell you herself.”
“No. I know why she couldn’t tell me.”
Dawn was silent. Nicky knew she expected her to go on, but she couldn’t. There were some words too terrible to be spoken out loud. “Thank you,” Nicky said at last. “I needed someone with answers.”
Dawn hesitated, as if she weren’t sure what to do. Then she leaned forward and kissed Nicky’s cheek.
Nicky went to the window again after Dawn left and rested her cheek against the window frame. She was a woman who looked toward the future and rarely considered her past. The future beckoned, but the past had always been a weight around her heart. And still, as hard as she had tried to forget where she had come from and who she had been, it was with her still.
Her hand went to the locket; it was warm against her skin. “I know why you didn’t tell me, Aurore,” she whispered. “How could you have told me, after everything that happened next?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Paris, 1927
Chez
