I Stepped Over a Little Girl’s Sidewalk Portrait—Then She Said I Was Her Mother

## chapter 01 - The Face Beneath My Heel

The little girl was kneeling on the sidewalk outside the Madison Crown Café, drawing a woman’s face in black and white chalk.

I noticed the portrait before I noticed her.

The face was almost three feet wide, framed by dark waves of hair. A circular necklace rested beneath the woman’s throat. The eyes were unfinished, but there was something painfully familiar about them.

I was checking a message from my husband when the heel of my shoe landed across one of those eyes.

“No!”

The child’s scream stopped half the sidewalk.

She couldn’t have been older than eight. Her thin beige dress was torn near one shoulder, and dirt streaked both cheeks. A piece of white chalk trembled between her fingers.

“You ruined her,” she cried.

People at the café turned to watch. I felt irritation rise before compassion had time to reach me.

“I didn’t see your drawing,” I said. “I’ll pay you for it.”

I opened my purse.

The girl looked at the money as though I had offered her an insult.

“You can’t pay for someone’s face.”

An elderly man in a brown jacket pushed through the gathering crowd and dropped to one knee beside her. He tried to repair the damaged eye with his fingertips, but my shoe had ground the chalk into the concrete.

A police officer arrived seconds later. He crouched beside the child while keeping one hand near his radio.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Hope.”

“Where are your parents?”

Hope didn’t answer him.

She stared at the gold necklace around my throat.

It was a thick chain with a small circular pendant, a piece my mother had given me when I became president of Vale Urban Properties.

Hope slowly lifted her chalk-covered finger.

“The circle,” she whispered.

I glanced at the portrait again.

The woman in the drawing wore the same necklace.

The elderly man looked from the portrait to me. His expression changed first.