Grandpa looked down at Ivy again.
“Your mother worked for Richard Carter.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“She was the nanny for his son.”
My breathing changed.
“Julian?”
Grandpa nodded.
“He was seven.”
“When?”
“You were around four years old.”
I frowned.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Rachel lived on the Carter property for a while because the job included accommodations.”
He finally met my eyes.
“And you lived there with her.”
I stopped breathing.
Something moved at the edge of my memory.
Green.
Sunlight.
Flowers.
“A garden,” I whispered.
Grandpa froze.
“What?”
“There was a huge garden.”
His eyes filled.
“Yes.”
Another image came.
Red paint.
Training wheels lying in the grass.
“A bicycle.”
Grandpa closed his eyes briefly.
“A red one.”
My heart began racing.
“There was a boy.”
The memory sharpened.
Dark hair.
A child laughing behind me.
A hand gripping the back of my bicycle seat.
“He used to help me ride it.”
Grandpa nodded.
“That was Julian.”
The porch seemed to tilt beneath me.
The bookstore where Julian and I supposedly met two years earlier flashed through my mind.
The way he had stared at me that first afternoon.
The strange softness in his expression.
The questions he occasionally asked about my childhood.
Whether I remembered living anywhere besides Grandpa’s house.
Whether I had ever owned a red bicycle.
Whether I remembered a large garden.
I had always thought they were random questions.
They weren’t.
Julian had known exactly who I was.
From the beginning.
I looked at Grandpa.
“What happened there?”
