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The knot in the pit of her stomach turned to stone. Her hands went from warm to cold. No one knew about her childhood.No one.She never shared the circumstance of her birth. Not with school friends. Never with a colleague. Not even with the boyfriend she’d dated in fine arts school. She’d hidden it, made up stories, told lies, her shame so great the words to explain wouldn’t come.

“You know my mother?” she asked, the question abrading the back of her throat.

“No.”

“I don’t understand.”

“To be expected,” he said, his expression so somber old wounds reopened. The grief Truly struggled so hard to hide uncoiled inside her. “What happened is, for all intents and purposes, incomprehensible.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“I know.” Clenching the battered handle of his briefcase so hard the leather creaked, he drew a deep breath. “But I don’t have time to explain. We need to —”

“Make time.”

“It’s not my place, Truly. All will be revealed in time.”

In time.

She hated that expression. In the beginning, during her years in foster care, she’d asked question after question, wanting to know everything, all the why’s and how’s surrounding her birth. Later, she’d learned to ignore the mystery. It had taken years, but practice had yielded the necessary results. Now, she didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to dissect the past or dive into what it meant for her future. What she wanted was to forget her parents had left her in a cardboard box on the steps of a Catholic church and never looked back.

No love lost for her parents. Just complete abandonment framed by religious fervor.

Truly swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth.

She wanted to say she didn’t care. Years had passed. She’d made a life for herself. Her origins no longer mattered, but even as she repeated the familiar refrain inside her head, the truth came calling, unearthing emotional landmines. All the questions she worked so hard to suppress resurfaced, rising like vipers, threatening to strike, making her want to know. Whom did she look like? Where did she get her creative drive? Why had she never felt like she fit in anywhere with anyone?

That last question always got to her. And as she studied the squat man standing five feet away, she finally accepted that ignoring the truth never made it go away. Denying she’d been left on the steps of St. Redeemer’s as a baby, the only clue to who she was (first name and date of birth) written on a scrap of paper pinned to front of her tiny coat, wouldn’t change anything. She was an orphan, a foster kid turned adult with a deep yearning to understand. Maybe then the hurt she hid from everyone would fade.

The unwelcome realization sharpened her edges.

Her focus riveted to the troll, she leveled her chin. “Who are you?”

“Minador,” he said, watching her with rapt interest. “Your great-aunt’s solicitor.”

Right. Of course. Hergreat-aunt. “You have the wrong person. I don’t have any family.”

“Untrue. You simply were never told the truth about whence you came.”

His words rang through her. She picked up the idiosyncrasies in his speech like candy dropped on the ground.About whence she came— strange turn of phrase. Who talked that way anymore?

Truly stared at him.

He stared back at her.

She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“I apologize for the shock. I know it is a lot to accept, but you are Truly Isabeth Turnbolt,” he said, tone soft, trying to be gentle.

“If that’s true, then why now? Where have you and my great-aunt been?”

“Watching. Waiting. You’ve never been alone. Not for a moment, Truly. You may believe you were abandoned, but we’ve kept tabs on you over the years and —”

“And that’s not creepy at all,” she said, sarcasm shoving her tone into deadpan.

He snorted, making a whistling sound. “Had you been raised in the bosom of your family, there would be no need to explain the name you carry now is not the one given to you at birth. It was changed to protect you. But now that you have reached your twenty-seventh year, we can delay no longer.”

“What has my birthday got to do with it?”