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Natalie

Natalie stares at the photo of Beatrice for so long that she forgets to breathe.

She can’t make sense of what she’s seeing. In the first place, Beatrice’s last name is Chambers. Not Vespertini. But more importantly, what is Beatrice—the Beatrice she and her mom know so well—doing in this report?

What the hell does this mean?

Natalie literally runs to get her laptop. She’s typing Beatrice Vespertini into a search bar almost before her bottom hits the couch again.

The search turns up nothing.

Okay. That’s frustrating. Maybe she changed her name a long time ago? But why? And how does any of this fit together?

She searches Beatrice Chambers Portland Maine with predictable results. She finds a few pictures of Beatrice at various charity events around Portland and a profile on LinkedIn that reveals nothing.

Natalie grabs her phone and opens Instagram, where she’s already following Beatrice’s private account, and where Beatrice follows Natalie, too. But Beatrice’s list of followers is unremarkable. No Vespertinis.

She sorts through everything she knows about Beatrice, and it doesn’t amount to a lot:

She’s younger than Rowan, so she was born in the early nineties. This was after the maternity home was closed, but in the photo, she wears a Saint Raymond medallion.

Beatrice said her mother died when she was a little girl—probably before this picture was taken.

Her father was somebody who thought he was “too good” for her.

And Vespertini appears on that list of four names. Why?

She grabs her mother’s notes and sifts through them again. The only other Vespertini her mother found was a name on a University of Maine flyer for a choral production. There was a Vespertini in the alto section.

Natalie looks at Beatrice’s LinkedIn profile. She graduated from the University of Maine.

Her mother needs to see this.

She types a text.

Natalie: Hey, where are you? I found something.

She hits send, and then decides the text doesn’t properly convey the situation.

Natalie: I found something WILD.

Because it really is. Natalie clearly remembers the first time she wore her Saint Raymond medallion to yoga class. It was a bad wardrobe choice—every time she leaned into a forward fold, the medallion smacked her in the chin.

But after class, Beatrice took note of it. “I like your necklace,” she’d said. “Where did you get it?”

“From my father,” Natalie had replied.

But then Beatrice didn’t say: I have one just like it.

She only said: “It’s so unique. And so beautiful.”