Chapter 2 - The Locket's Inscription
Lucy didn't pull the necklace out. Panic, sudden and blinding, flared in her chest. She had lived on the streets long enough to know that when something seemed too miraculous, it was usually a trap, a cruel joke, or a hallucination brought on by starvation.
"Lucy?" Eleanor asked, noticing the sudden rigidity in the girl's posture. "Are you alright? Is the food too heavy?"
"No," Lucy said quickly, her voice dropping to a panicked whisper. "The food is amazing. I... I just need to use the restroom."
She stood up so fast her chair scraped loudly against the floorboards. Raymond Pierce, the manager, immediately looked over from the host stand, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. Lucy ignored him, rushing down the narrow hallway toward the back of the restaurant where the restrooms were located.
Inside the brightly lit, marble-tiled bathroom, Lucy leaned against the sink, her chest heaving. She reached into her shirt and pulled out the locket. It was covered in decades of grime, the silver darkened to a dull, charcoal gray.
With trembling fingers, she turned the crescent moon over. She had never been able to read the faded, elegant cursive engraved on the back because the metal was so worn, and she had never had a magnifying glass or proper light to inspect it closely. But as she held it beneath the bright, unforgiving LED bulbs of the vanity mirror, she rubbed her thumb over the metal.
The letters suddenly seemed to align with the words Eleanor had just spoken.
M... y... l... i... g... h... t.
May you like
Lucy choked back a sob. She didn't remember her childhood before the age of five. Her earliest memory was waking up in a crowded, underfunded foster home in upstate New York, with a severe concussion and no memory of her name, her parents, or where she had come from. The state had given her the name Lucy Harper based on a faded tag inside the oversized jacket she had been wearing when a truck driver found her wandering near a highway rest stop.
She had spent eighteen years bouncing from abusive foster homes to state institutions, holding onto the silver moon like a talisman, the only proof that she hadn't simply materialized out of thin air.
