Page 45 of The Rook’s Obsession

Nick didn’t tell me that. He told me the street name and the house number. I’ve been standing on the sidewalk across the street for the last few minutes, staring at it. Waiting for something to happen inside my head. A piece clicking into place. A light turning on. Anything.

Nothing happens.

The house itself is small, crammed between identical neighbors with identical stoops and the same façade. There’s a kid’s bicycle chained to the railing. A different family lives there now, with a different life. The people who lived here before are gone. The only proof they existed stands across the street with clenched fists and a blank mind.

“Anything?” Nick asks. He’s beside me, not quite hovering, but not exactly leaving me on my own, either. His fists are shoved into his pockets, telling me what it’s taking him to keep silent while I work this out. Like he has to consciously keep a grip on himself, or else he’ll pounce or something.

I appreciate the effort he’s making. I don’t appreciate being studied, though.

Still, I’m sorry when I turn to him and shake my head. “No.” The word has a bitter taste to it. I turn away from the blue door and start walking.

He falls in step next to me without a word. We walk the block, then the next one, then the one after that. He points out things as we go. The corner store where Liam got into his first fight. The basketball court with the chain-link fence where Nick spent hour after hour. The alley where he hid from a foster parent who had no business being responsible for a child. He tells me all these things in a quiet, even voice. Not pushing, just laying them out in front of me, like he’s putting down a path he wants me to walk.

He’s not the only one who wants something. I want to feel. That’s the worst part. I’m not resisting anymore—I’ve moved past that, past the denial and the reflexive rejection of everything he says. I want the memories to come now. I want to look at that basketball court and see a boy with pale eyes shooting hoops. I want to walk past the corner store and hear the bell above the door and remember the times my mother sent me down there for milk or bread. I want to stand in front of the blue door and feel something other than the hollow ache of absence.

But I can’t. And the wanting only makes the absence worse.

“It’s okay,” he says, because he can read me now. “It doesn’t always happen right away.”

“I know.” But my jaw is tight, and my hands are shoved in my pockets to keep them from shaking in frustration that’s starting to edge its way closer to rage with every step I take.

Because here’s what I keep coming back to: Nick has these memories. The basketball court, the corner store, the blue door, and everything in between. Those memories are warm, living things inside him. He carries an entire childhood in his head, and apparently, that childhood included me. A girl named Laura, who was loved. Laura had a family that ate together and kept flowers in the window boxes.

According to every photograph and story, and detail he’s shared, I was that girl.

But I have nothing. Only Vincenzo’s version of love, which turned out to be nothing more than a tracker in my back. He didn’t take me in to take care of me. He took me in to develop me into something he could use.

And maybe, if it hadn’t been for Nick finding me and finding the tracker, I could have been all right with that. I could have lived with it my whole life because I would never have known anything else.

It’s too late for that now. I’ve crossed a line I can’t uncross.

Laura was loved. The thought repeats like a heartbeat I can’t slow down. She was loved, and she didn’t know it, because she became someone else. Someone who was used.

And dammit, I wish I could be her.

It’s not an invited thought, or a comfortable one. Still, I let it stay, because I’m too tired to fight it. I wish I could be the girl in the photos. The one sitting on the dock with her feet in the water, leaning against her brother while they both laughed at something. Maybe it was a joke only the two of them understood, the way I’ve heard siblings can be. I wouldn’t know. Ivy could never understand what Laura lived.

It doesn’t matter how much I wish. Wishing doesn’t make it true. This is just a street. Concrete and brick, with the same stoops and the same cracked sidewalk for block after block. I don’t belong here.

I don’t belong anywhere.

He reaches out, takes my arm, and his touch brings me back to the present. “Come on. There’s one more place I want to take you.”

We need to drive, as it turns out. The diner sits on a corner about ten minutes from the old neighborhood. From the outside, it looks like every other diner I’ve ever seen: glass front, neon sign, metal siding that probably looked modern back when the place was built. A chalkboard by the entrance advertises the daily special in large, loopy cursive.

It doesn’t hit me until we get out of the car in the tiny lot behind the building that I’ve been hoping I’ll remember something. It’s unanticipated, and I’m getting a little more nervous with every step I take. I don’t know why. When did everything change? When did I go from refusing to accept his stories to craving more? Not very long ago, I would’ve resented this. Now? I’m fighting not to get my hopes up.

After all, diners are diners. They have pretty much the same layout. The same booths. The same laminated menus with pictures of food that never looks like what finally reaches the table. There’s nothing unique about this place that should mean anything to me.

Then Nick opens the door, and we step inside. The smell hits me all at once.

It’s not one thing in particular, but rather a combination of aromas. Grease and maple syrup and something underneath, something I’ve never smelled anywhere but here. It could be the oil they use in the fryer, or maybe it’s the way the ventilation carries the scent of the kitchen through the dining room. It’s distinctive in a way I can’t identify, and it hits me in the chest like a fist.

I know this smell.

My body knows it before my brain can catch up. The aroma moves through me and touches something very deep. Something old. Something I didn’t know was there.

My head turns, and my eyes find the booth before I understand why.