Chapter 8 - The MemoryThe station became chaos.
Carmine dragged Ivy into a maintenance corridor.
“Don’t move.”
“What does she mean, memory?”
“I don’t know.”
“She said my father protected something.”
“Ivy.”
“What?”
“Think.”
She did.
Her childhood.
Her father.
Their apartment.
His books.
His old watch.
A music box.
Then she remembered.
A memory she had not thought about in years.
Her father kneeling beside her on the night before he died.
He had pressed a small brass key into her hand.
“You must never give this to anyone.”
She remembered his exact words.
“Not even if they tell you they love you.”
Ivy opened her eyes.
“The key.”
Carmine stared.
“What key?”
“My father gave me one.”
“Where is it?”
“I don't know.”
Then she remembered something else.
Her mother had sewn it into the lining of her childhood coat.
Carmine took her back to the estate.
They searched her old storage boxes.
At the bottom was the coat.
Inside the lining, a tiny brass key.
Carmine stared at it.
“This opens something.”
“What?”
He turned it over.
There were initials engraved on the back.
L.D.
Lucia DeLuca.
Carmine went silent.
“Your mother?”
“Yes.”
Ivy looked at him.
“Could she be alive?”
Before he answered, his phone rang.
A voice whispered:
“Boss, we found Maria.”
“Where?”
“Your mother’s old house.”
Carmine grabbed his coat.
They arrived twenty minutes later.
The house was abandoned.
Dust everywhere.
A single bedroom door stood open.
Inside was an old wooden chest.
The brass key fit perfectly.
Carmine opened it.
Inside was a photograph.
Ivy’s father.
Carmine’s mother.
And a third person.
A young Carmine.
But the photograph was impossible.
Because the date printed on the back was sixteen years before Carmine said he had ever met Ivy’s father.
Ivy looked at him.
“You knew him before.”
Carmine said nothing.
“You lied to me.”
“No.”
“You did.”
He stepped back.
“There are things I never told you because I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
A gunshot came from the hallway.
Carmine spun.
A shadow disappeared around the corner.
He chased it.
Ivy stayed inside the room.
Then she noticed another photograph beneath the chest.
She picked it up.
It showed her father standing beside Maria.
And between them was a little girl.
Ivy.
But the photograph was dated two years before Ivy was born.
May you like
On the back, someone had written:
THE FIRST VERSION FAILED.
