Matteo stood behind him.
“You want me to go in first?”
“No.”
Dominic’s hand shook on the handle.
He opened the door.
A woman sat beside the window.
Thin.
Dark hair cut to her shoulders.
A pale scar running along the right side of her face.
She turned.
Dominic forgot how to breathe.
For twenty-six months he had imagined Elena in dreams.
Sometimes laughing.
Sometimes angry.
Sometimes walking away before he could reach her.
The woman by the window stared at him.
Her eyes widened.
Dominic whispered her name.
“Elena.”
She stood slowly.
Her lips parted.
No sound came.
Then her gaze dropped to his left hand.
To the wedding band Dominic had never removed.
Tears appeared in her eyes.
“Dom?”
His legs almost collapsed.
He crossed the room.
Elena flinched.
Dominic stopped immediately.
Pain tore through him.
“It’s me.”
She touched her temple.
“They told me…”
“What?”
“They told me I caused the accident.”
Her voice was weak.
“That my husband died.”
Dominic closed his eyes.
Elena began crying.
“They said my baby died too.”
He looked at her.
“What?”
“They showed me photographs.”
Her entire body shook.
“A funeral. A little white coffin.”
Dominic crossed the distance carefully.
“Elena.”
She looked at him.
“Aria is alive.”
Elena made a sound Dominic would remember until the day he died.
Not a scream.
Not a sob.
Something deeper.
A sound torn from the center of a mother who had mourned a living child.
“She’s alive?”
“She’s alive.”
Elena covered her mouth.
Dominic pulled out his phone.
His hands shook so badly he nearly dropped it.
The lock screen was Aria.
Chocolate smeared across her cheeks.
Laughing.
Elena touched the screen.
“My baby.”
“She remembers you.”
Elena sobbed.
“My baby.”
This time when Dominic stepped forward, she let him hold her.
And for the first time in twenty-six months, the dead woman in his dreams had a heartbeat.
Vivienne was arrested forty-eight hours later.
She had crossed into Canada using a false passport.
Marcus gave investigators everything.
Emails.
Payment records.
Names.
The truth emerged slowly.
Vivienne had tampered with Elena’s brakes after discovering Elena had learned about Aurora House and their shared father.
But Elena survived the crash.
A passing driver pulled her from the wreck before the fire consumed the car.
Vivienne arrived before police.
She told paramedics Elena was her unstable cousin.
Using forged medical authorization and help from a corrupt physician, she transferred the badly injured, disoriented Elena to Aurora House.
Then another body was placed in the wreckage.
A woman named Evelyn Ross.
Homeless.
Terminally ill.
A former patient from one of Vivienne’s mother’s clinics.
Her dental files were substituted for Elena’s.
