Chapter 1

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Heavy drops of October rain began to drum against the windowsill, spreading in wide dark spots across the asphalt path strewn with yellow leaves, and at last, with the first gust of wind, they struck the glass. They slid down in crooked lines, cold and distant, moving faster and faster…

Within a minute, the figure beyond the window was impossible to make out. Nothing remained but a black silhouette, but I knew it was him.

My heart, my enemy, and my love.

Today everything was different. Today we both knew it: I remembered everything.

Lena

The first time I saw him was when my father (back then I still thought Mark Holt, that huge blond man with the hooked nose and predatory gray eyes, was my father) brought my mother and me back from Houston, Texas, to his hometown, Sandfield Rock.

I had just turned eleven, started middle school and the music program, and I was even happy when, one morning after breakfast, Mom kept me in the kitchen of our little rented apartment and told me we were going home. Really home, to the place where her husband was waiting for her and where a warm roof and a family were waiting for me.

For as long as I could remember, we had moved from place to place: Oregon, Arizona, Texas. Whenever Mom hit a dead end with work, or some suitor nearby got too persistent, she packed our things, put me in the car, our used Ford Crown Victoria with its body-on-frame chassis, turned the key, and pulled onto the highway, where she pushed the gas to a hundred miles an hour and carried us off to a new town.

After she told me the news, Mom faltered. There was a glass of wine in her slender hand, probably the cheapest, nastiest kind, and a strange look had frozen in her big eyes, as if she were staring through me into her own past. But against the narrow window with its peeling paint, pale-skinned, golden-haired Adelie Marten, in a cherry silk slip that bared her beautiful shoulders, looked magnificent. To me, at any rate.

"Mark never remarried, our marriage still hasn't been dissolved, so why not try again? In the end, even a hare has to roll onto its back and surrender to the hunter's mercy once its paws turn out not to be fast and strong enough." That was what she said then, and she smiled: "Isn't that right, little teal[*]?"

Migratory birds. That was what she called us, and I nodded:

"That's right, Mom!"

Some people are hardened by loneliness. It planes them down to sharp edges, tans their character in a headwind, forces them to put down roots in society and become stronger. But my mother was not that kind of woman. Adelie Marten's soul held very little pragmatism and a great deal of freedom. Not the kind of freedom that liberates you and grows from the solid ground of security and comfort; otherwise she would long ago have found herself some rich man from the ones always circling nearby and lived like a queen. Hers was the kind that made her pack her things, pay the bills, and drive down the highway into the unknown until the very end. The kind you need like air.

At eleven, I had already begun to understand a few things about adult life: how hard it was for my mother to manage everything, and how much lower the horizon of her sky kept sinking. How much more she was troubled by my longing for the friends we had left behind and by my dream of finding a real home, one with a grand piano that absolutely had to stand in the big living room.

Well, fine, not a grand piano. I giggled at that dream myself when I told Mom about it. But at least an upright piano (my cheap keyboard kept breaking), because how else was I supposed to learn? And I wanted to play so badly.

I think that last part was what pushed Mom to return to Sandfield Rock. In the end, not to Mark at all, but to the town where she had been born and where he would not have left her in peace anyway. Now I'm almost sure of it.

I'm also sure that her first condition for Holt was that he had to give her little girl a fairy tale. That was why Mark called himself my father, and why I believed him.

Because I wanted to believe.

Mark came for us himself: a large man in a big, new Chrysler van with chrome wheels and a toothy grille, looking just as solid and sturdy as its owner. When he walked into the motel where we had been living for the last two weeks, he looked first at my mother, long and assessing, then glanced at me, briefly and grimly. After that, without a word, he carried our suitcases and boxes out to the parking lot, the few things we owned.

My strongest memory of that day is the black lacquer paint, thick and hard, that covered his expensive van. It shone in the sun like a mirror, smelled of something mechanical, and all at once I felt both bitter and amused. Maybe because we were leaving and had sold our old but beloved Ford, or maybe because I saw my warped reflection in the van door and stuck my tongue out at it. Just to spoil that perfect surface somehow and not cry.

Not a single scratch. That was what struck me then.

Later I would learn that this was Mark Holt all over. Only the very best, no matter what it cost him.

Dad noticed my little stunt, and I felt ashamed. The thought suddenly came to me: what if he didn't like me?.. Of course I didn't remember him at all, but I considered myself old enough not to do things like that. And Mom... Mom smiled. So faintly that if I hadn't known her all my life, I never would have noticed.

On the way to North Carolina, we stopped often, and at Mark's request I got out of the van to stretch my legs and kick pebbles along the shoulder. Stranger still, I now had to sleep in a separate hotel room instead of with Mom, the way I was used to. But I didn't complain. Mom was no longer alone, and even if my father kept his distance from me, I wanted to believe he wasn't mean. Otherwise he wouldn't have bought me ice cream and chocolate doughnuts, right?

And maybe he would still become kind and friendly, like the father of my friend Camilla, who had stayed behind in Texas. I just had to behave, not make my parents' lives harder, and everything would be fine!

Most likely, I would have gone on making excuses for a long time for why my father was cold and unfriendly with me, and why the two of us never managed to get close even though I studied hard and caused him no trouble, if not for his son Nick, my older brother. Or more precisely, my older stepbrother, Nicholas.

It was from him, soon after our move, that I learned the truth. That I was no daughter of Mark Holt's, and that he had adopted me only because of his unhealthy obsession with my mother. The woman who had once made his father lose his head, then run off to California with some loser, either a race car driver or a musician.

But he would tell me all that later, when one day he and I were left alone in the house and he had his fill of laughing at awkward little Teal, his stepsister, whom he would come to hate. Not in front of his father, and not in front of my mother. Oh, no! No one in Sandfield Rock would dare look at Adelie Holt the wrong way. Not even Mark Holt's beloved son and heir, Nicholas.

But I didn't begin my story with him. I began it with Alex, my neighbor.