My six-year-old nephew dragged himself to my doorstep with his little sister hanging onto his shirt. “She locked us downstairs again,” he whispered. I thought his broken leg came from their desperate escape—until the doctor studied his X-ray and told me the injury was much older than that

Chapter 6

I called my mother again, and this time I didn’t ease into the conversation with pleasantries or small talk — I asked her directly who Emily Carter was, and when she hesitated, I told her that I had seen a birth certificate and a letter from Ethan, and that I needed the truth, no matter how painful it was.

She started crying before she even spoke, and I knew that whatever she was about to tell me would change everything. “She’s your sister,” she said finally, her voice breaking. “Your half-sister. Your father had a daughter before he married me, Thomas, and I didn’t know about her until years after we were married.”

I sat down on the garage floor again, the phone pressed against my ear, trying to process the fact that I had a sibling I had never known about. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, and she said that my father had begged her to keep it secret, that he was ashamed of how he had treated Emily’s mother, that he had made her promise never to tell anyone about his other family.

“Where is Emily now?” I asked, and my mother’s silence was answer enough.

“She disappeared six years ago,” she finally said. “Her mother reported her missing, but the police never found her. Your father said it was best not to get involved, that Emily had made her own choices and we had no responsibility for her.”

I asked her about Saint Catherine’s, and she told me that my father had worked with them for years, handling insurance policies and financial arrangements for wealthy families who wanted to adopt children discreetly. “He said everything was legal,” she said, but there was doubt in her voice, the kind of doubt that had been growing for decades.

I asked her about the ledger, and she told me that Ethan had given it to her a week before he died, that he had come to her house looking terrified, that he had said he found something he wasn’t supposed to find and needed her to keep it safe. She had hidden it in her attic, under the insulation, where she thought no one would ever find it.

I told her not to touch it, that I was sending police to retrieve it, and I hung up and called Cole immediately, asking her to dispatch officers to my mother’s house in San Antonio to secure the ledger before anyone else could get to it.

But when the officers arrived, the back door was already open, the attic had been accessed, and the ledger was gone. Nothing else had been taken — not the jewelry box on the dresser, not the television in the living room, not the cash in the kitchen drawer. Only the ledger, as if someone had known exactly where to look and what to take.

I felt a cold certainty settle into my bones as I realized that Ethan’s warning had been justified — someone was watching us, someone knew about the ledger, someone had moved faster than we had. And that someone was connected to the same network of people who had kept Emily hidden for six years, who had broken Leo’s ribs, who had locked children in a basement and called it parenting.

I drove back to the hospital with a new sense of urgency, my mind racing through the possibilities, trying to figure out who could have known about the ledger and how they had found out before I did. When I arrived, I found Detective Cole standing outside Leo’s room, her phone pressed to her ear and her expression tight with barely contained frustration.

“We have a leak,” she said after she hung up, and I nodded because I had already reached the same conclusion. “Someone in the department knew about the ledger before I did. Someone told the person who stole it.”

I thought about Ethan’s letter, about his warning to trust no one until I knew who Detective Warren was, and I realized that the network of people who had enabled this — the abuse, the disappearance, the hidden rooms — was larger and more deeply entrenched than I had ever imagined. Saint Catherine’s had been operating for decades, facilitating illegal adoptions and covering up the truth, and the people involved had spent years building systems of protection that extended into law enforcement, the legal profession, and beyond.

I looked at Leo through the window, watching him sleep with his sister’s hand in his, and I made a promise to myself that I would tear down every single one of those systems, no matter how long it took or how many people I had to go through to get there.