Chapter 7 - THE LULLABY ONLY CHLOE KNEWThe samples were sealed in separate security envelopes.
Marc assigned a guard to accompany them directly to the laboratory.
Vivian volunteered her driver.
Adrian refused.
“We use independent transport.”
Vivian smiled tightly.
“You suspect everyone now.”
“I suspect unexplained behavior.”
Sophie remained in a private gallery office.
Someone found her a black coat to place over the cleaning uniform.
She refused to remove the blue uniform entirely.
It was the only clothing that belonged to her current life.
Adrian stood near the window.
Neither knew how to begin.
Five years separated them.
So did a funeral, a new relationship and a child who had grown without her mother.
Sophie spoke first.
“You stopped wearing your wedding ring.”
Adrian looked at his hand.
“I wore it for three years.”
“I wasn’t accusing you.”
“It felt like you were.”
“I don’t have the right.”
“If you are Sophie, you have every right.”
The words hurt both of them.
Chloe sat on the carpet drawing.
She placed three figures beneath blue flowers.
One wore a black suit.
One wore pink.
The third wore a blue dress and a white mask.
“Why did you draw the mask?” Sophie asked.
“So you don’t feel scared without it.”
Sophie touched her scar.
After leaving the clinic, strangers stared.
Children sometimes asked what happened.
The surgical mask allowed her to disappear.
Chloe looked up.
“I like your face.”
Sophie’s eyes filled with tears.
“Even this side?”
“That side too.”
Adrian turned toward the window so neither would see him cry.
Chloe began humming.
The melody was Sophie’s lullaby.
“How do you know that?” Sophie asked.
“Daddy sings it wrong.”
Adrian looked offended despite everything.
“I do not.”
“You forget the second part.”
Sophie laughed.
The sound was soft and unfamiliar after years of silence.
She sang the missing verse.
Chloe joined on the last line as though she had always known it.
Adrian remembered singing it beside the child’s hospital crib after the fire.
Chloe had been too young to understand the words.
But her body had remembered the melody.
Perhaps that was how she recognized Sophie.
Not through a clear infant memory.
Through voice, rhythm and the feeling of being held.
After Chloe fell asleep on the office sofa, Adrian asked about Sophie’s lost years.
She remembered waking in Maison Sainte-Cécile with burns and a head injury.
Staff called her Élise.
A doctor said she was found near a train station with no identification.
Her memory returned in fragments.
A river.
A dark-haired man.
A baby crying.
Blue flowers.
Whenever she asked to contact police, staff told her an identity search had found nothing.
“Why did you stay so long?”
“I was ill. Then I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“A red-haired woman visited.”
Adrian’s face changed.
“She said my family was dead.”
“Vivian?”
“I couldn’t remember her name. But I remembered fear when I saw her.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“The clinic kept my documents. They said I needed supervised care.”
Sophie eventually escaped after a nurse named Amélie Rousseau helped her.
She worked in kitchens and hotels under the Élise identity.
Her memories returned more strongly when she saw Adrian and Chloe in a magazine.
“I wrote to you.”
“I never received the letters.”
“I came to your home once.”
Adrian stared.
“When?”
“Two months ago.”
“The guards would have called me.”
“They called someone.”
“Vivian.”
Sophie nodded.
“She came to the gate. She said if I approached Chloe, she would prove I was dangerous.”
In the gallery hall, Vivian sat alone.
Her phone vibrated.
A message appeared from the man in the gray coat:
The courier has been redirected.
Vivian deleted it.
Inside the office, Chloe woke suddenly.
She looked toward the glass wall.
“That’s the man from before.”
Adrian followed her gaze.
May you like
The gray-coated man was gone.
So was the guard carrying the DNA samples.
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