Chapter 9: The Little Wooden Horse

“He’s alive,” Mara said before I could ask.

She kept pressure on the wound while the guards lifted Lorenzo onto the stretcher. I followed them through the side door, one hand on Balthazar’s neck to keep him away from the unfamiliar equipment.

An estate vehicle waited at the end of the chapel path.

Matteo stayed long enough to secure Dritan and the surviving gunmen. He sent a guard ahead with us, then looked at me.

“I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

“Don’t lose the bag.”

“Mara has it.”

I looked at the doctor. She lifted it where I could see.

I let a stable handler take Balthazar’s lead.

“Open field,” I told him. “Away from the smoke. Don’t tie him short.”

“I know horses,” the man said gently.

I almost apologized. Instead, I stroked Balthazar once more and climbed into the vehicle beside Lorenzo.

On the service road, sirens met us.

After that, everything happened in pieces. Ambulance doors. Questions about how far along I was. A paramedic asking whether I’d lost consciousness. Mara refusing to release pressure until another pair of hands replaced hers.

Lorenzo went into surgery.

I went to an examination room.

For the first time all day, someone offered me privacy before asking me to undress.

I cried again, quietly, while the nurse waited outside the curtain.

The examination took longer than I wanted. I answered questions, repeated the sequence of falls, and listened while the doctor explained what they would watch for.

The baby’s heartbeat stayed steady.

They kept me for monitoring, cleaned the cut on my neck, and eventually let me sit near the surgical waiting area with a nurse checking on me.

I was still wearing my stained uniform beneath a borrowed sweatshirt.

Matteo arrived carrying two cups of coffee.

He looked at my belly and exchanged one for water before sitting down.

“Dritan?” I asked.

“In custody. Several of his men too.”

“The horses?”

“All out. The handlers counted them twice. Balthazar objected to the first count.”

I managed a tired smile.

“Mara gave a statement,” he continued. “Her lawyer sent the copies she mentioned. The investigators have the clinic material.”

“That doesn’t make her innocent.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

He didn’t offer an excuse for her. I was grateful.

I took his phone out of my apron and held it toward him.

“I still need to make a call.”

“Keep it.”

I searched for the animal-rescue foundation Ethan worked with. The woman who answered couldn’t give me his private number, but she listened when I explained who I was.

I left my name, the hospital number, and a message she promised to pass through their overseas coordinator.

“Tell him I didn’t stop writing,” I said. “Please include that.”

She repeated it back to me.

When I ended the call, Matteo was looking at the surgical doors.

“Did you know my mother?” I asked.

“A little. I was younger then. I mostly knew her as the woman who could tell Lorenzo he was being an idiot and expect him to listen.”

“Did he?”

“Sometimes.”

He set his cup down and reached inside his jacket.

“There’s something he asked me to keep safe after the fire alarms started. It was in his office.”

He placed a small wooden horse in my palm.

The paint had darkened with age. One leg was repaired with thin silver wire.

I turned it over.

A tiny N was carved beneath the belly.

“I remember this,” I said.

Not an entire scene. The shape of it. A short-legged horse in a photograph, sitting beside a baby’s blanket.

“Lorenzo made it,” Matteo said. “Before you were born.”

“Why did he have it?”

“He found it in the burned car.”

I looked up sharply.

“But we weren’t in the car.”

“That’s what we know now.”

He took a photocopied letter from an envelope.

“Mara had this among the material Danny sent. Your grandfather wrote it to an old friend. He asked for help finding work under another name.”

The handwriting made my throat tighten.

Grandpa’s careful capitals. The hooked tail on the y. I had seen it on feed orders and birthday cards all my life.

Matteo waited while I read.

My grandfather and Elena had changed vehicles before leaving New York. Another driver took the original car as a decoy after they noticed they were being followed.

That was the car that burned.

The driver died. Elena and I did not.

Some of our belongings remained behind, including the wooden horse.

I pressed my thumb against its broken leg.

“He thought Lorenzo’s family sent the men.”

“His father had threatened Elena,” Matteo said. “He had reason to believe it. We never knew they’d changed cars.”

The letter described the journey to Kentucky. New names. Cash work. A baby who cried when the nights grew cold.

My grandfather had been afraid someone would follow them to the farm. Even after my mother became ill. Even after she died.

I reached the line where he wrote that keeping me hidden was the last thing he could do for his daughter.

For years, I had thought his silence meant there was nothing worth telling.

It had meant there was too much.

“Did Lorenzo stop looking?” I asked.

“No.”

Matteo rubbed a hand over his face.

“Some years there was nothing to follow. Then a photograph, a name, a rumor. He paid people to check all of it. Most were lies.”

“That doesn’t give him the right to run my life.”

“No,” Matteo said. “But it may explain why he’ll try.”

I folded the letter carefully. I wanted the original. I wanted every letter in the box Danny had taken. For now, this copy was enough to prove my grandfather hadn’t simply erased my past out of indifference.

Across the waiting room, a phone rang. Somebody started crying. The surgical doors stayed closed.

I held the little horse between both hands.

“Nora was her choice,” Matteo said. “Lorenzo wanted Lucia.”

“She won?”

“Obviously.”

I traced the N until footsteps made me look up.

A surgeon stood in the doorway, removing his cap.

Matteo rose. I followed more slowly.

“He’s through surgery,” the man said. “He’s stable. We’ll be watching him closely.”

The horse almost slipped from my fingers.

“Can I see him?”

“For a few minutes, once recovery clears you.”

I sat back down because my knees had begun to shake.

Lorenzo was alive. The baby was moving. Ethan might soon hear my voice again.

None of it decided what happened next.

I looked at the wooden horse, then at the doors.

When they let me through, I would go in as Nora Hayes.

Not his maid. Not Dritan’s bargaining chip.

And not a daughter who could be ordered to stay.