The Girl With the Silver Moon
The relentless Chicago rain slicked the city pavements, turning the reflection of the streetlamps into fractured starlight. Jace Mercer, exhausted from a late-night meeting at the children's hospital, stepped out into the chill. That was when he noticed her—a woman huddled against the unforgiving stone wall across the street. She wore an oversized cream sweater, and her arms were wrapped tightly around a sleeping little girl in a dusty rose dress. Neither of them had an umbrella.
Jace almost kept walking. For years, he had trained himself not to look too closely at people who reminded him of the life he had lost. Then the child shifted in her mother’s lap, and a small silver pendant slipped from her hand.
It was shaped like a crescent moon.
Jace stopped so suddenly that the man behind him nearly collided with his shoulder. His own pendant, hidden beneath his black shirt, seemed to burn against his chest. There were only two pieces like it. He had designed them himself six years earlier—one moon for him, one star for the woman he had planned to marry.
The woman against the wall lifted her face. Her eyes were swollen from crying, but Jace knew them instantly.
"Evelyn?"
Her entire body went rigid.
The little girl woke at the sound of her mother’s sharp breath. She blinked at Jace, then looked down at the pendant in her palm. "Mommy," she whispered, "he has the other one."
Jace pulled the chain from beneath his collar. His pendant was a silver star, scratched along one edge from the night of the accident that had supposedly killed Evelyn.
Evelyn pressed the child closer. "Please," she said, her voice trembling. "Don’t call anyone."
Jace’s anger rose faster than the rainwater rushing along the curb. For six years, he had believed she was dead. He had stood beside an empty coffin. He had watched his father collapse at the memorial. He had spent every night since wondering what he could have done differently.
Now she was alive, sitting ten feet away, holding a little girl whose gray-green eyes looked exactly like his.
"Who is she?" he asked.
Evelyn’s lips parted, but no answer came.
The child touched the star at his chest with one cautious finger. "My name is Lily," she said. "Are you the man from Mommy’s picture?"
Before Jace could respond, headlights swept across the sidewalk. A black SUV slowed beside them.
Evelyn’s fear became immediate and unmistakable.
"They found us," she whispered.