“Still on your record.” He waved the papers in his hand.
They seemed endless. I wondered what else he had on me. Did he have my entire life story written on those pages? Was it as hopeless as the real story? As pathetic? I let go of the doorknob and walked inside, taking the side across from him at the table. He pulled out his chair and signaled me to sit in mine. I signaled him to sit first. He shook his head and took a seat. I followed suit. He seemed like the kind of man who let his daughters walk all over him. The kind of father Aisha had—stern but fair, and completely bendable.
“Are you going to tell me what I’m doing here now?”
“How do you know Chris?”
“Who’s Chris?”
“Chris Ryan. You were in his house last night.”
“Oh.” I felt myself frown. I was in someone’s house last night? That must have been before I ended up in The Institute.
“So, Chris Ryan,” Detective Barry prompted.
“I don’t know him.”
“You don’t know him?”
“This is going to sound extremely convenient.” I ran my hands over my face and exhaled. “But I have no memory of what happened last night. I woke up in The Institute this morning and checked myself out and I don’t even know how that happened either.”
“Chris says you met him on Tinder.”
I searched Detective Barry’s clear blue eyes. “Did something happen to Chris?”
“No. He’s fine.”
“So, why are we talking about some random guy I met on Tinder?”
“He called us about you.”
“Why?” I blinked. “Did he also drive me to The Institute?”
“No. He says you left in a Lyft and he didn’t know where you were going.” He flipped through his stack of pages and brought out a picture, sliding it over to me and tapping it twice. “Do you know this woman?”
I picked up the picture and stared at it, then looked at him, and at the picture again. “It’s . . . me.”
“Is it?”
“I mean, it must be.” The girl in the picture had my long, wavy, brown hair, brown eyes, caramel skin. She was wearing makeup, which I rarely wore, and a fancy-looking blouse I’d never seen before, but she looked just like me. I set the photo down. “Is someone trying to frame me for something?”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything? Why did I wake up in a mental institution this morning with no memory of how my night went?”
“Do you have enemies? Someone who would try to frame you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Who do you live with, Miss Guerra?”
“Alone and I keep to myself for the most part. My friend Aisha can attest to that.”
“What do you do on a regular basis, besides meet guys on Tinder and go to their homes? Hang out with Aisha?”
“I’m a teacher’s assistant at a small parish school and I’m studying elementary education. I hang out with my friends and drink occasionally.”
“Drink?” he raised an eyebrow. “That’s not legal.”
“I guess you have reason to arrest me then.”
“You clearly have no issues being arrested even though it’ll go on your record, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t know many teachers with records.”
“So, what’s up with this?” I nodded at the picture, ignoring his analysis of me.
“This is a missing girl.” He raised the picture up. “I just spent the last two hours trying to grasp what the possibilities could be and the only one I can come up with is that you’re sisters.”
“Yeah right.” I scoffed. “I don’t have a sister.”
“You were both adopted on the same day from the same place, St. Nicolas’ Orphanage. You have the same birthday. You both attend Ellis University. She lives a block away from campus, you live a few blocks down. Have you ever looked into who your birth parents were?”
I let myself process his words before nodding, unable to form words over the knot in my throat. Of course I’d tried to look for my birth parents. Tried and failed. I didn’t have the kind of money I needed to hire an investigator or lawyer who would actually fight with me against the orphanage I’d come from, especially since it was funded by the Catholic Church. Even Karen, who was a devout Catholic and had donated half of her measly paychecks to the church most of her life, had no pull in that department. I glanced at the picture again. A sister. A twin sister. Hope bloomed inside me. It was the kind of hope life had repeatedly squashed until I no longer believed it existed, yet there it was again, rearing its head and trying to seep through.
“Miss Guerra,” he said.
“The orphanage told us that it was a closed adoption. My mother—my adoptive mother—helped me once. She said they were pretty clear about not going back and asking more questions.”