Page 67 of Memories of the Lost

“Not really.” She thought about the thin clues. “But a man she used to date when I was little said he did know about the death of her daughter. He said that girl was my sister. But when I asked a woman in LA about it, she didn’t know anything about me, a second daughter.”The weirdness welled up in her throat, and she felt suddenly, alarmingly, unmoored. She shook her head, trying to keep it together.

Liam looped an arm around her wordlessly.

“It’s just so ... disorienting,” she said, “to think I know my history and then find out it’s all a big lie. Or mess.” Her throat was tight. “I really don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” he said quietly. “Until you know the next step.”

Ease moved through her body all at once, as if someone had pulled a plug in her toe and all the tense worry poured out. “Huh,” she said, looking up at him. “That was pretty helpful.”

He winked. “Just doing my job, love.”

“Well, thanks.” She traced a circle of words spiraling around his wrist in a stylized script. “What is this one?”

“‘There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same.’”

“More Rumi?”

“Tolkien.” Liam smiled. “Krish and I discoveredThe Lord of the Ringsat thirteen, and it was life-changing. We desperately wanted to be cast in the movies.”

“Were you Frodo or Sam?”

“You’re a fan!” he said.

She held out a hand, tipping it back and forth. “Sort of. It’s a lot of boy-quest stuff. I was more of a Game of Thrones fan. Books, not the TV series.”

“Always the book.” They fist-bumped.

“Khaleesi?”

“Who else?”

“I never wanted to be a hobbit,” he confessed. “Aragorn all the way.”

“Of course.” The sun blinked behind a row of buildings in the distance, covering them in gold, then darkness, then gold again. “Were you a big reader?”

“Hell, yeah. Still am. You?”

“We didn’t have a television, and my mother believed in the library.”

He laughed. The sound was slightly hoarse, deep. “We were such deprived kids, yeah?”

“So deprived. When did you get a computer?”

“Not until I was at uni.”

“I got a laptop with money I earned myself, but we didn’t have internet. I had to take it into town to an internet café. Remember that?”

“I do.”

“Prime view of Lady Liberty coming up,” Tillie said, standing. “Let’s get some photos.”

She showed him the gorgeous view of the Statue of Liberty from the ferry. They shot selfies of themselves hamming it up, and he let her take some of him in different lights and angles for her painting. He took approximately three hundred of her, which was both flattering and disconcerting.

They didn’t get off the ferry, just looped back, and found a good vegetarian restaurant where they ate heartily, then walked the miles back to her apartment, talking. Time went so fast that she felt panicky when they got to her place—where there was no Jared, thank God. Liam looked up at the windows, where her lights were on.

“Do you have time to come up?” she asked.

“No. A car is on the way here now.” He twined his fingers in hers. “And if I go up there, I’ll cry.”