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 9

The name Margaret gave us was Harold Warren — the retired detective that Ethan had warned me about in his letter, the same man who had served as the police liaison for Saint Catherine’s for over a decade. According to Margaret, Warren had been the one who arranged the “special placements” — the adoptions that weren’t really adoptions, the transfers of children from one family to another without any legal oversight, the disappearances of mothers who tried to fight back.

I asked Detective Cole if she could bring Warren in for questioning, and she told me that she had already tried — that Warren had left Florida three days earlier, that his house was empty, that his phone had been disconnected, and that he had apparently vanished as soon as the news about Rebecca’s arrest broke.

“He’s running,” I said, and Cole nodded grimly.

“Or he’s already where he needs to be.”

I asked her what she meant, and she told me that Warren’s last known location was San Antonio — the same city where my mother lived, the same city where the ledger had been stolen, the same city where the farmhouse had been found.

I felt a chill run down my spine as I realized that Warren had been ahead of us the entire time, that he had known about the investigation before we even started it, that he had been watching and waiting and covering his tracks while we stumbled through the dark.

But if Warren was running, that meant he was scared — and if he was scared, that meant we were getting close to something he didn’t want us to find.

I drove back to the hospital with a new sense of purpose, my mind racing through the possibilities, trying to figure out where Warren would go and what he would do next. The sun was setting over Austin, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that seemed almost obscene given the darkness that had consumed my life over the past few days.

When I arrived at Leo’s room, I found him sitting up in bed, his eyes fixed on the door as if he had been waiting for me. “Uncle Thomas,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made my heart stop, “I remember something.”

I sat down beside him, my pulse quickening. “What do you remember?”

“The lady in the basement,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “She gave me something.”

I leaned closer, my heart pounding in my chest. “What did she give you?”

He reached under his pillow and pulled out a small object — a silver pendant shaped like a compass, worn and tarnished with age, the chain broken as if it had been torn from someone’s neck. “She told me to keep it safe,” he said. “She said it belonged to someone who loved me.”

I took the pendant from his hand, turning it over in my fingers, and I noticed an inscription on the back — a date, and a single word: Emily.

I looked at Leo, at this child who had survived so much, who had carried a secret for years without telling anyone, who had kept his mother’s pendant hidden even when he was locked in the dark, even when he was crawling with a broken leg, even when he was protecting his sister from a world that had failed him so completely.

“I need to go somewhere,” I said, my voice tight with emotion. “I need to find the lady who gave you this.”

Leo nodded, as if he had been expecting this, and he reached out and took my hand. “Be careful,” he said. “She said there are bad people who don’t want her to be found.”

I squeezed his hand and promised him that I would be careful, that I would come back, that I would never leave him again.