“Oh.” Jace chuckled nervously.
“Don’t give away my trade secrets!” Stanley bellowed from the kitchen.
“Sorry!” Lilah picked up a yellowed piece of paper from the top of the cardboard box her father had brought down from the attic. “I can’t believe this is all my mother wrote,” she sighed, reading the faded note again. “We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but we no longer have the means to look after Lilah and her special needs. Please see to it that Lilah receives the love and care that we couldn’t provide her…” I mean, it sounds like it was written about a stray dog, not someone’s child!”
“It was a lousy thing to do,” Jace agreed. “May I see?”
“Sure,” she replied, handing him the paper.
He squinted as he tried to read the small, cramped writing. After a moment he gave a resigned sigh, then reached into his jacket pocket to fetch a pair of thick-framed reading glasses. “Don’t laugh, okay? I get enough grief from the guys at practice.”
She nodded solemnly. “I promise I won’t.” It wasn’t a difficult promise to keep. The glasses, though a bit oversized for Jace’s face, somehow made him look even more handsome, in Lilah’s opinion. His sandy-blond hair framed the black frames quite nicely, accentuating the deep ocean blue of his eyes. He looked a bit like a doctor, or maybe even a professor…
Lilah gasped. “I remember now!”
Jace gave her a startled look. “Remember what?”
“The other night – at the concert! You were older at one point – maybe forty years old. You even had a beard!”
His hand flew to his bare chin. “I did?”
“Yes! You were jumping back and forth between being a little boy and an old man.”
“Since when is forty old?” Stanley hollered from the kitchen.
Jace was staring at her dumbly. “I don’t remember that.”
“You wouldn’t!” Her father yelled again. “How would you have known unless there was a mirror right in front of you?”
Jace stared at the archway leading into the kitchen. “What would have happened if Lilah had sent that area of the balcony even further back in time? Like, twenty or thirty years?”
Stanley appeared in the doorway, drying his hands with a towel. “I’m no expert in time bending, but my guess is, along with the ten-year-old wood that made up the balcony, you’d have disappeared altogether.”
“And then what?” Jace swallowed.
Stanley shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. All I can say is, if she starts getting all glassy eyed, grab her and don’t let go.” His eyes narrowed as he considered his own words. “Actually, scratch that. Keep your hands off my daughter at all times. If you turn into an unfertilized egg and an erstwhile twinkle in your father’s eye, that’s on you.”
“Gross, Dad.” Lilah rolled her eyes.
Jace, in the meantime, was doing everything he could to avoid her father’s mischievous grin. “Hey, it looks like there’s some sort of smudge near the bottom here,” he murmured, frowning at the note in his hands. “Like something’s been erased—”
“What?” Stanley asked, striding into the room. “Let me see that.” He took the note over to the fireplace, where he carefully held it over the flames to get a closer look. “Well, I’ll be damned! The kid’s right!”
Lilah stood next to him, inclining her head to see. “Doesn’t that look like it might have been a ‘W’?” she asked, pointing to the left side of the smudge.
Her father nodded. “And three vertical scratches after that… maybe ‘I’s or ‘L’s?”
“Maybe ‘Willie’?” Lilah suggested.
“Wilburt?” Jace offered.
“Wilfred? Or maybe even Willamina?” She suddenly giggled. “Hey, wasn’t that the name of our sixth-grade class salamander?”
“Yes!” Jace groaned. “Did you know that Ricky Garza once dared me to kiss it?”
“I remember – you leaned in to do it and the poor thing clamped onto your lip and wouldn’t let go—”
“Don’t remind me!”
“Willow,” Stanley whispered.
“What?” Lilah and Jace stopped mid-giggle. “How can you tell?” She asked, taking the note to peer at it closer. “I can’t make out the last few letters. It’s just a smudge.”
“It’s Willow,” Stanley repeated. “Oh, how could I be so stupid?” He ran over to Jace, who was still perched on the edge of the couch, and scooped him into a forceful hug. “Jace, ol’ buddy, I could kiss you!”
As the younger man fumbled to retrieve his fallen glasses from between the couch cushions, Lilah was staring at her father, mortified. “Dad? Are you okay?”
“Willow!” Stanley was spinning in a circle beside the fireplace, raising the crumpled note to the ceiling with both hands. “It was them!”
He dropped beside the box, dumping folders and files and stapled packets of paper onto the ground as he did. Motes of dust floated into the air, making Lilah’s eyes water. After a minute of frantic digging, Stanley pulled out a single piece of paper – a photocopy from an old newspaper article. An article that was published sixteen years ago.
“This!” he exclaimed, thrusting the paper at Lilah. “This is what I’m talking about!”
Lilah took the piece of paper in her hands. “‘Reclusive Woman and Teenage Daughter Disappear Overnight’?”
“Keep reading,” Stanley instructed.
“This morning, at approximately 5:15 a.m., authorities discovered an abandoned vehicle on the side of I-90. Records indicate that the van, whose engine was still running at the time of discovery, is registered to 34-year-old Celeste Mayweather, also known as Vivienne Brown. A search is currently underway for the woman, as well as her 15-year-old daughter, Willow.” Lilah looked up from the article. “Dad, I don’t understand.”
“Look at the date,” he pointed. “In the middle of the night, on that exact same day, you were abandoned at the station. About a half an hour away from where their van was found.”
His daughter gasped. “You mean – the Willow in this article?”
“Yep – I’m guessing they’re one and the same. The only thing that confuses me is why Celeste would have her teenage daughter sign the note instead of her.”
“Maybe Celeste isn’t Lilah’s birth mother,” Jace remarked. “Maybe Willow is.”
Stanley gave him an appalled look. “Come on. She was just a kid. Younger than Lilah, even!”
The younger man shrugged. “I mean…teen pregnancies happen. When my cousin got knocked up a few years ago, they moved to a new town and my aunt pretended it was hers.” His eyes widened slightly. “Please don’t mention that to anyone. My mom would kill me.”
“As I said, nothing leaves this room,” Stanley replied dryly.
“How weird would that be?” Lilah shuddered. “She’d be more like a big sister than a mother!”
“Best way to find out is to ask her,” Jace said.