“Clare was seven months pregnant when she vanished. I suppose if the same thing happened today, she’d risk an unassisted birth, but back then her version of off-grid was a seventy-year-old midwife in a small French town, and that meant birth records, which meant birth certificates, and the names on those birth certificates—our actual true given names—have never been used for anything, ever. Hell, John and I had never even heard our own fucking names until Clare handed us those documents as a ‘Happy sweet sixteen, you should probably know about this.’ For the longest time we thought it was just another made-up identity, but the punch line, the reason I went to France, was that whoever bought our tickets used our birth names.”

“So, Dmitry has your birth certificates?”

“Well, someone in Moscow does, or this is Clare fucking with us again. Even in the digital age, there’s no single French repository for birth information. To get those certificates, someone had to know what name Clare was using, the day we were born, and the town itself. There are only three people on this planet who have that information, and it didn’t come from me or John. Even if, for the sake of argument, someone had the time, resources, and motivation to track those details down, he’d have still had to show up in person to get the actual certificates. So I went to the mairie to see if there were margin notes—stuff that’s recorded but doesn’t show up anywhere else—maybe something about Clare or her babies or a father, and if there was nothing, I wanted to see that nothing for myself.”

“I assume you found the nothing.”

“Far as I know, yeah. The records clerks have both been working there for over fifteen years, so at this point all I know is that if this wasn’t Clare’s doing, whoever tracked that information down did it over fifteen years ago.”

“That’s a long time to wait to use it.”

“Right?”

“You told John?”

“No.”

“But if you had found something?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

“Your brother wants this more than anything in the world, but the closer he gets to finding answers, the less you care if something goes wrong? It’s not that complicated.”

She said, “If this friendship thing is going to work, you’re going to have to learn to lie more. The honesty stuff freaks me out.”

Holden snorted and smiled. “You should think about that.”

He stretched a hand toward her. She reached up. His fingers swallowed hers, and he pulled her off the floor, and she stood, her hand in his, caught off guard and off balance. Her cheeks flushed. She tugged away.

She said, “You’re really going to go after him?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, fuck it,” she said. “Why exactly does John think I know his plan?”