Chapter 1

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Heavy drops of October rain drummed against the windowsill, splashed in broad blotches across the asphalt path strewn with yellow leaves, and finally, with the first gust of wind, struck the glass. They slid down in curved lines, cold and remote, racing faster and faster...

Within a minute, the figure outside the window could no longer be made out; only a black silhouette remained, 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 big blond brute 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, had 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. Truly home, to the place where her husband was waiting for her, and where a warm home and a family were waiting for me.

For as long as I could remember, we had moved from place to place: Oregon, Arizona, Texas. As soon as Mom hit a dead end with work, or some suitor nearby became too persistent, she would pack our things, put me in the car--our used Ford Crown Victoria with its body-on-frame chassis--turn the key, and pull onto the highway, where she would push the gas up to a hundred miles an hour and carry us off to a new town.

Back then, after telling me the news, Mom faltered. There was a glass of wine in her slender hand--surely the cheapest, nastiest kind--and a strange look had frozen in her large 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 camisole that bared her beautiful shoulders, looked magnificent. To me, at any rate.

"Mark never married anyone else, our marriage still hasn't been dissolved, so why not try again? In the end, even a hare has to lie on 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 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 tempered by loneliness. It planes them down to sharp edges, toughens their character with a headwind, forcing them to put down roots in society and grow 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 comfort and prosperity, because otherwise she would long ago have found herself some rich man from among the ones always hovering nearby and lived like a queen. No, hers was the kind that made her pack her things, pay the bills, and drive down the highway into the unknown until the very last moment. The kind you need like air.

By the age of 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 low the horizon of her sky kept sinking. How much more my longing for the friends we had left behind troubled her, and my dream of finding a real home, one that would absolutely have a grand piano in its large living room.

Well, all right, 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 to play? And I wanted to play very badly.

I think that last thing 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 have left her no peace anyway. Now I am almost sure of it.

And I am also sure that her first condition for Holt was this: he had to give her girl a fairy tale. That was why Mark presented himself as 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 came into the motel where we had been living for the past two weeks, he looked first at my mother--with a long, assessing stare--and 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 the 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, whatever 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 did not 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 had not known her all my life, I would never 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 hotel rooms of my own instead of with Mom, as I had always been used to. But I did not complain. Mom was no longer alone, and even if my father kept his distance from me, I wanted to believe he was not cruel. Otherwise he would not have bought me ice cream and chocolate donuts, 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 kept finding excuses for a long time for why my father was dry and unfriendly with me, and why the two of us never managed to grow close despite my studying diligently and causing 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 solely because of his unhealthy obsession with my mother. A woman who had once made Mark lose his head, then run off to California with some loser--a race car driver, or maybe 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 a good laugh at the awkward 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 did not begin my story with him at all. I began it with Alex--my neighbor.