A train station.
A small golden object swinging from someone's hand.
Then darkness.
He had experienced variations of that dream since childhood, although psychologists had offered different explanations over the years.
Trauma.
Fragmented memory.
Childhood anxiety.
Alexandre had stopped asking.
He knew almost nothing about the first five years of his life.
The official story was simple.
Following a major road accident outside Lyon, he had been found injured and confused several kilometers from the crash site. He could say only his first name, Alex, and provide scattered details that led nowhere. He spent weeks in a hospital, then months moving through temporary care while authorities attempted to identify his family.
Eventually, a French-Canadian couple, Michel and Anne Laurent, became his foster parents and later adopted him.
They loved him.
He loved them.
They gave him an education, stability, and opportunities beyond anything he could have imagined.
He never blamed them for the life he had lost.
Still, somewhere beneath the successful adult he had become lived a five-year-old boy who remembered a woman singing beside a kitchen window.
Sometimes he remembered a younger child laughing.
Sometimes he remembered the smell of lavender.
Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he saw a woman's hand fastening a gold chain around his neck.
None of it had ever been enough to find anyone.
Alexandre began walking toward his meeting.
Then something flashed at the edge of his vision.
Gold.
He stopped.
For reasons he could not explain, he turned toward the little table beside the pavement.
His eyes moved across the cracked cups, the buttons, the spoons, and the old watch.
Then they landed on the locket.
His heartbeat changed.
Alexandre stood perfectly still.
Behind him, pedestrians flowed around his body, annoyed by the obstruction, but he barely noticed them.
There was nothing extraordinary about the locket.
Yet he knew it.
Not consciously.
Not logically.
He simply knew it.
He stepped closer.
Claire straightened immediately when she noticed the elegant stranger approaching.
“Good morning, monsieur.”
Alexandre did not answer at first.
His eyes remained fixed on the locket.
“May I see that?”
Claire followed his gaze.
Her expression changed.
“The necklace?”
“Yes.”
For a moment she hesitated.
Then she picked it up and placed it carefully in his palm.
The instant the metal touched his skin, a sensation moved through him so sharply that he almost dropped it.
Cold rain.
A child's crying.
A woman shouting his name.
Alexandre blinked.
The street returned.
He turned the locket over.
On the back were several scratches, but beneath them he could just make out a tiny engraved star.
His thumb froze over it.
He had drawn that star thousands of times as a child.
On schoolbooks.
On napkins.
On the corners of letters.
He had never known why.
“Does it open?” he asked.
Claire nodded.
“The hinge sticks. Push gently.”
Alexandre pressed his thumbnail beneath the edge.
The locket opened.
The world stopped.
Inside was a tiny photograph, yellowed and faded by time.
It showed a little boy with dark hair and solemn eyes, perhaps four or five years old, standing beside a flowering bush.
Alexandre stared at him.
He had seen that face before.
Not in memory.
In photographs of himself after his adoption.
The same eyes.
The same crooked left eyebrow.
The same small scar above the lip.
His breathing became shallow.
Then he noticed the engraving inside the opposite half of the locket.
A single name.
ALEX.
His fingers began to shake.
Julien looked at his grandmother.
Claire had gone pale.
Alexandre lifted his eyes slowly.
“Where did you get this?”
His voice sounded different now, stripped of its confidence.
Claire swallowed.
“It belonged to my son.”
Alexandre stared at her.
“What was his name?”
She looked at the photograph.
“Alex.”
The traffic continued around them.
Somewhere behind Alexandre, someone laughed.
A bicycle bell rang.
A waiter carried a tray onto a café terrace.
Yet for the three people standing around the little folding table, the rest of Paris seemed to move farther and farther away.
Alexandre struggled to speak.
“What happened to him?”
Claire's eyes filled immediately.
“I lost him.”
“How?”
She seemed uncertain why this stranger was asking, but there was something in his expression that prevented her from turning away.
“There was an accident,” she said. “Many years ago.”
Alexandre gripped the edge of the table.
“Where?”
“Near Lyon.”
His face lost all color.
Claire saw it.
She took a step forward.
“Monsieur?”
“What year?”