“Mom?” The name barely escaped my lips. Tears streamed down my face. “Are you real?” I choked out between sobs.
“Yes, baby, I am.” She pulled me into her embrace.
Her familiar scent of lavender and that unmistakable clean fragrance I had always grown up with filled my nose.
When she pulled away, I blinked through my tears, examining her face closely. She appeared just as I remembered, though her hair was now shorter and styled in a bob, and the right side of her face bore scars from the fire that extended down to her neck. I looked at her hand and saw the same markings.
“How... how are you here? I saw you… die,” I whispered, the weight of that horrible memory crashing down.
Mom gently wiped tears from my cheeks, cupping my face. “I’m so sorry you had to witness that. But please believe me when I say that everything I did was to protect you.”
The pressure in my chest intensified with each sob as we clung to each other. Her warmth was the only reminder that she was here. She was real. Alive.
But even as I buried my face in her shoulder, Chris remained in my thoughts. He should have been here, too, but he wasn’t. He died protecting me. The tears wouldn’t stop, a relentless flow that couldn’t blur the images of that night.
But the memories of that night returned like a fist clenching around my heart. The night that left me with many unanswered questions I could now have answered.
“Mom?” I ventured cautiously.
“Yes, sweetheart?” she responded, her voice soft yet resolute.
“I have questions.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“The house was on fire. How did you escape?”
She pulled back enough for me to see her face, her eyes shimmering with tears. Mom ran her hands down my arms. “The ambulance arrived just in time and took me away,” she explained. “I’ve been in a coma for several months.”
I shook my head, trying desperately to make sense of it all. “Then what happened?” I asked.
“When I finally came to, I was listed as a Jane Doe.”
A shadow passed over her face, and she took a slow, fortifying breath. “Before I go any further, there is something you need to know. Chris and I were never married. He was an undercover agent assigned to protect us.”
I felt the air leave my lungs. “Wh-what?”
“My heart has always belonged to your father.”
A wave of warmth flooded through me at her words.
Mom continued. “When the police arrived at the crime scene, they assumed that whoever killed Chris—” She swallowed hard, her eyes squeezing shut for a moment before opening again. “And whoever set the house on fire… they were still out there.”
My jaw dropped. “How… how did they find us?” I asked.
“Do you remember that terrible accident? The one where a ten-car pileup claimed several lives?”
I nodded, recalling the event. “You were on that highway coming home from work, labeled a hero for saving that baby and mother before the wreckage caught fire.”
She nodded solemnly.
Then it hit me like a lightning bolt. “He saw you on the news.”
“Yes. It went national.”
Everything started to click into place.
“When I woke up from the coma, the agents working on my case filled me in,” she began, her gaze locking onto mine. “They told me that Madison was killed.”
