She Discovers Their Secret, She Chooses Their World novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Whose Daughter

Élise's POV

I woke at dawn in Sergio's bed, with Marco's arm across my waist and Sergio's back to the window.

The manila envelope lay on the nightstand where Sergio had dropped it in the small hours.

Elsa's photographs were fanned out beside it, and her looping hand showed on the back of the top one.

I turned them face down.

The old men had given me until Friday to take the chair or lose the vote to her.

The yellow raincoat photograph stood on the dresser in its frame.

I looked at my mother laughing and at the tall man beside her, and I understood that I had her nose and his jaw.

Sergio was already awake.

"Elsa wants my seat, and you still held something back last night," I said. "You stopped."

"Yes."

"Tell me the part you couldn't say with the old men downstairs."

Marco sat up, and the sheet fell to his waist.

He and Sergio looked at each other, and something passed between them that had been passing for twelve years.

"I'll say it," Marco said. "It's mine to say."

"Go on."

"The women," he said.

My stomach turned over.

"I know about the women."

"You know what you saw. You do not know why you saw it."

He rubbed his face with both hands.

"We were twenty-eight when we took you in," he said. "We swore you would grow up in a house with no hands on you."

"And?"

"And that if you ever came to us as a woman, you would come knowing exactly who we were."

"And the women?"

"When you came into the study, we did not send you away," Sergio said. "If you saw the worst of us and ran, you were safe. If you stayed, you were choosing."

"You wanted me to see you," I said.

"We wanted you to be free to go," Marco said. "And God help us, we hoped you wouldn't."

I stared at him.

"I thought I was a charity case," I said. "I thought you let me call you family because you felt sorry for the dead nurse's girl."

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