Page 169 of Dance of Thorns

I spent a long time thinking about writing this letter, and was at a loss how I could ensure it stayed hidden until such time when you were no longer in danger. I’ve come up with a plan.

This letter will go into a safety deposit box, paid through the next forty years.

Your father has recently been having me help him update his living will, including dictating terms for me to type. He’s quite slow on a keyboard.

Since, I am sad to say, the danger comes exclusively from your father, tomorrow, I’ll be adding one final note to that living will before I mail it to his lawyers: that upon his death, the safety deposit box I mentioned above will be opened, and this letter will eventually find its way to you.

I'm sure that doesn’t make sense yet, but it will in a moment.

I’m also afraid I’m rambling, so I’ll get to the point. If you’re not already, I would suggest you sit down.

Your life is not what you’ve been told it is.

Your parents are not the people you’ve heard about in my vague, flowery stories. Your father was not Sean Laramie. He was never in the Marines, and he didn’t die in Kabul before you were born. Your mother was not Michelle Peltier, and she didn’t die giving birth to you.

Sean and Michelle were never real people. Your background is a lie you were told, again and again, to keep you safe.

Your actual father is Cesare Marchetti. And by extension, Dove, whom you’ve grown up alongside as if you were sisters, IS in fact, your sister.

Your fraternal twin, actually.

As to your real mother, well, the stories I told you about Michelle are all true, except they’re actually about a wonderful, loving woman named Lydia.

Your father shot her three weeks after you and Dove were born.

Your mother’s maiden name was Lydia Bancroft. I don’t know much about her background, because she rarely spoke of it. But I do know that you have an uncle somewhere, and I believe two male cousins.

Your grandfather, Quentin Bancroft, was a dangerous man. On the eve of your mother’s eighteenth birthday, he married her off to your father as part of a business arrangement. That’s when we met, and I protected her as best as I could.

She was pregnant within six months of the wedding, but when she found out she was having twins, she didn't tell your father. She may have hatedhim, but the second she heard both your little heartbeats, you were her true loves. And so two weeks before her due date, in an effort to keep you from your father, she ran.

She told your father she was going to a prenatal specialist in Boston. Once she was there, she skipped out on the guards he’d sent.

Meanwhile, I told your father I was going to visit my non-existent daughter, Michelle, for the birth of my granddaughter. Instead went to Boston and met up with Lydia.

Three weeks later, you and Dove came into the world, in a quiet seaside cabin in Boothbay, Maine.

Your mother knew your father wouldn’t rest until he got his hands on you both. So she made contact with an organization called the Obsidian Syndicate, to which your grandfather had connections. Bluntly, she offered the leader of this organization dirt on your father in exchange for his help getting the four of us new lives.

Unfortunately, on the night we left to go start those new lives, something went terribly wrong. Your mother sent you and I off with one escort from the Syndicate, while she and your sister went to go meet with a second escort to take them a different way.

Instead of her escort, it was your father waiting for her. He shot her in the stomach, took your sister, and left your mother to die in the rain. I'll never forget how rainy that night was.

But don’t worry, my Lark. This story doesn’t end there.

Your mother didn’t die that night. She was close, but she was found by the Syndicate men who were there to bring her and Dove to safety.

Regardless, all I heard was that she’d been killed, and Dove had been stolen back by your father. I had a choice to make: keep running with you and pray that the Syndicate upheld their end of the bargain out of charity, since they were no longer getting the dirt on your father. Or I could go back and watch over your sister the same way I had watched over your mother.

Well, you know which choice I made.

I went back to New York, your father none the wiser that I’d helped his wife escape from his clutches. I explained you and the frequent tears in my eyes with a cockamamie story that my daughter, Michelle, had died giving birth to you. I suppose that’s where your father, unoriginal thief that he is, got the idea to tell first me and then Dove the same story about Lydia.

I told myself that it wasn't that dangerous for you to be in the same house as that monster because he didn’t know you existed. And you got to be there, under his very nose, growing up under the same roof as your sister. I thought your mother would be happy about that.

Then, a year after the night I thought she died, your mother contacted me.

She’d been taken in by the Syndicate, who saved her from death. They even helped her learn to walk again, as your father’s bullet had paralyzed her from the waist down.