Chapter 2 - The Grandmother Who Stopped Smiling
Nora Shaw had spent forty years as a nurse and the next fifteen criticizing hospital television dramas.
“They all wear their stethoscopes like jewelry,” she would complain.
Emma usually laughed.
That morning, she did not.
She entered the care facility carrying the photograph in a clear document sleeve, her medical bag over one shoulder.
Nora sat beside the window, reading a paperback with a cracked spine.
At eighty-one, she was physically frail and mentally sharper than most people who underestimated her.
“You look dreadful.”
“I had a long shift.”
“You always have a long shift.”
Emma sat.
Then placed the photograph between them.
Nora’s hand froze on the page.
For several seconds, she did not breathe.
“Where did you get that?”
“Someone pushed it under my door.”
Nora closed the book.
“Who?”
“Dr. Martin Keller. At least that’s what he called himself.”
The color drained from her face.
Emma felt something inside her tighten.
“Who is Emilia?”
Nora looked toward the open doorway.
“Close that.”
“No.”
Her grandmother blinked.
“Emma.”
“No more making things smaller before you tell me what they are.”
Nora’s eyes filled.
Emma had seen her cry only twice.
At Rebecca Shaw’s funeral.
And when Emma passed her licensing examination.
This was neither kind of crying.
“This morning,” Emma continued, “someone tried to move you from here using my name.”
Nora gripped the arms of her chair.
“They found you.”
The words were almost soundless.
Emma stood.
“Who found me?”
Before Nora answered, the administrator knocked and entered with a security officer.
A man had arrived asking to speak with them.
His name was Luca Moretti.
Emma almost refused.
Then the administrator explained that he had provided identification and agreed to remain in the public meeting room.
Emma asked Nora to stay with a nurse.
She went downstairs alone.
Luca stood when she entered.
He was the man who had brought her behind the hospital curtain.
“You should be recovering,” she said.
“I wasn’t the patient.”
“I meant from your habit of making terrible introductions.”
He accepted that without argument.
“Mr. Russo asked me to give you information.”
“Then give it.”
He placed a photograph on the table.
The same woman.
Younger.
Standing beside a boy of perhaps ten.
Emma’s stomach turned.
The boy had Salvatore’s eyes.
“That is Elena Russo,” Luca said. “His mother.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“She died in a vehicle crash twenty-eight years ago.”
Emma looked at the woman’s face.
Something familiar lived around her mouth.
She hated how quickly the thought arrived.
“A baby was with her,” Luca continued. “Her daughter. Emilia.”
Emma did not sit.
“What happened to the baby?”
“Mr. Russo was told she died.”
The room became painfully quiet.
Outside, someone laughed at the reception desk.
Emma could hear every syllable.
“This is absurd.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t. People don’t show up with photographs and rearrange someone’s entire life.”
Luca lowered his gaze.
“Mr. Russo would like to speak with your grandmother.”
“He can request an appointment like anyone else.”
“Yes.”
“And nobody moves her. Nobody follows me. Nobody appears at my home.”
“I’ve communicated that.”
Emma took both photographs.
“I’m contacting an attorney.”
“That would be sensible.”
The agreement unsettled her.
She had expected resistance.
Upstairs, Nora waited with her hands folded tightly.
Emma shut the door this time.
By choice.
“Were you my grandmother?”
Nora flinched.
The past tense hurt them both.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Biologically?”
“No.”
Emma sat slowly.
“Was Rebecca my mother?”
“She adopted you.”
Rebecca.
The woman who had taught her to ride a bicycle, worked double shifts, and died when Emma was eighteen.
That part remained true.
Emma held on to it.
“Did she know?”
“Not at first.”
“At first?”
Nora covered her face.
“I thought I was protecting you.”
Emma looked at the photograph again.
Then at the woman who had raised her after Rebecca died.
“Start at the beginning.”
May you like
Nora lowered her hands.
“The night they brought you into the emergency department,” she said, “you were still wearing your mother’s blood.”
