Chapter 2
“You shouldn’t touch people when they’re angry,” Gabriel finally said, his voice low. Elsie tilted her head and gave him a serious look. “I know,” she answered, “but you looked like you needed somebody to.” The words struck him harder than any accusation could have.
Behind them, the servants remained frozen in the hallway. Nobody had ever spoken to Gabriel that way, least of all a child who barely reached his waist. Yet instead of sending her away, he lowered himself onto the bottom step. Elsie immediately sat beside him, close enough that her little shoulder touched his coat.
Gabriel looked down at the star again, and something buried deep inside him suddenly moved. Thirty years earlier, when he was only a boy himself, someone had given him a blue paper star on the worst night of his life. He had not thought about it in decades. He had convinced himself that memory was gone, along with the person who had placed it in his hand.
His breathing changed. Elsie noticed immediately. “Are you sad now?” she whispered. Gabriel swallowed hard and looked toward the tall windows. “No,” he said, though his voice betrayed him. “I just remembered something I promised myself I would never remember again.”
Chapter 2
Elsie leaned against his arm without asking permission. “Maybe remembering isn't bad,” she said. Gabriel almost smiled. Almost. Then his eyes fell on the crooked paper stars scattered across the marble floor, and he realized one of them looked exactly like the little star from his childhood.
He reached for it slowly. On the back, written in uneven blue crayon, were three words: **You are not alone.** Gabriel stared at them until his vision blurred. Those were the exact words his mother had whispered to him thirty years ago before she disappeared from his life forever.
“Elsie,” he said quietly, “who taught you to make these?” The little girl pointed toward the kitchen. “Mrs. Brooks did,” she answered. Then she paused and added, “But she said my mother used to make them too.”
Gabriel's head snapped toward her. “Your mother?” Elsie nodded innocently. “She said my mommy knew you a long time ago.” The room seemed to grow suddenly colder, and Gabriel slowly closed his hand around the paper star.
For thirty years, he had believed the past was buried. Now, sitting beside a four-year-old child who had somehow opened a door he had locked long ago, Gabriel understood one terrifying truth: someone had been keeping a secret from him all this time.