Chương 3
“You could have broken her arm.”
Daniel’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
Marcus looked at him.
Daniel had worked for him for fourteen years. He had taken a bullet in the shoulder outside a restaurant on Clark. He had carried Lily through smoke when a kitchen fire spread too quickly at the old house. He had never apologized with a word when a fact would do.
“Did you recognize Grace?” Marcus asked.
The guard’s gaze shifted toward the hospital door.
“In the photograph?”
“In the girl.”
“No.”
A pause followed.
Then Daniel said, “Not until she spoke.”
Marcus felt the letter against his chest.
“Why then?”
“Her voice drops on the last word when she’s scared.”
Marcus remembered Grace standing in a kitchen seven years earlier, telling him she was leaving. Her voice had dropped on the word tonight.
Claire looked up from her phone. “There’s something else.”
Marcus did not want something else.
“A reporter called my office,” she said. “He asked whether the child claimed to be a missing Blackwell heir.”
Daniel turned.
Marcus said, “The photograph from the park hasn’t been up an hour.”
“I know.”
“Who used that phrase?”
“The reporter wouldn’t say.”
“Find out.”
Claire put away her phone. “You are not assigning me an investigation.”
“You’ve done worse.”
“I’ve defended your companies from allegations. I have not helped you hunt sources.”
Marcus leaned back in the plastic chair. It creaked beneath him.
“Someone knew what fell from that rabbit.”
Claire’s expression changed by less than a degree.
Daniel said, “Only the people at the tree.”
“And whoever put it there,” Marcus replied.
Maria Ortega emerged from Emma’s room. She held her coffee with both hands.
“Mr. Blackwell, your daughter Lily may remain with you tonight. Emma will stay here pending medical clearance and an emergency placement review.”
“She comes home with me.”
“That is not happening tonight.”
“She asked for me.”
“She also told me she has spent the last three nights sleeping in a laundry room behind a twenty-four-hour laundromat.”
Marcus stood.
Daniel stepped away from the vending machines. Claire raised one hand without looking at him.
Maria continued. “Emma says her mother died six weeks ago. She was staying with a man named Cal Dwyer, who took their apartment keys, sold most of the furniture, and told her she owed him rent. She ran away after he tried to take the stuffed animal.”
“Where is he?”
Maria’s eyes hardened. “Not your concern.”
“He put his hands on my daughter.”
“Your legal relationship to that child is unconfirmed.”
“He put his hands on a child.”
“Then let the police do their jobs.”
Marcus had heard that sentence from men who collected salaries for not doing theirs.
Claire stepped between them, not physically, but with her voice. “What does Emma want?”
Maria glanced through the narrow window in the door. “She wants Lily to stay.”
Lily left the waiting room chair before Marcus could answer.
Maria stopped her. “Only for a few minutes.”
Lily looked at Marcus.
He nodded.
She entered Emma’s room carrying the rabbit.
At midnight, Marcus opened Grace’s letter in a small hospital conference room while Claire and Daniel sat across from him.
The first line made him close his eyes.
Marcus,
If Emma reached you, then I failed to live long enough to tell you this myself.
He lowered the page.
Claire waited. Daniel stared at the table.
Marcus continued.
There were two girls. Lily and Emma. Both were alive when I left St. Catherine’s. I did not abandon Lily, and I did not choose Emma because I loved her more.
Vincent Rusk told me the attack at the hospital came from inside your family. He said the men who wanted control of you would kill both children if the world knew there were twins. He showed me a recording of you saying that if I left, I would never take your child away. He told me you had agreed that one girl would stay with you and one would disappear with me until the danger passed.
I believed him because I was afraid of you.
That is the part I cannot make kinder.
You had never hurt me, but I had watched what happened to men who embarrassed you. I had heard you say cruel things when you were angry and apologize as though apologies erased the room. When you told me I could not take your child, you looked like someone I did not know. Vincent used that moment, and I let him.
He promised I could contact you after six months. Then he told me Lily would die if I tried.
Marcus stopped reading.
The fluorescent light hummed above them.
Claire asked, “Vincent Rusk?”
“He ran security and legal operations for my father.”
“Runs,” Daniel said.
Marcus looked at him.
Daniel’s mouth tightened. “He still runs more than he admits.”
The letter shook slightly. Marcus placed one hand flat over it.
Grace described a private ambulance, a house in Wisconsin, forged documents, cash delivered through men who never used the same name twice. She had tried to return to Chicago when Emma was two. Vincent met her outside a church before she reached Marcus. He showed her photographs of Lily entering preschool and told her how easily children wandered away from teachers.
After that, Grace moved whenever he told her to move.
She wrote that Emma knew Marcus only as a dangerous man in newspapers and a father in one hidden photograph. Grace had delayed sending the child because she feared that bringing Emma into Marcus’s world would finish what Vincent had begun.
Near the end, the handwriting weakened.
May you like
I became ill last winter. Vincent stopped sending money years ago, but fear keeps working after the person who planted it goes away. I still checked the street for his cars. I still changed buses when men looked at Emma too long.
The bracelets are real. The photograph was taken by a nurse named Josephine Bell. She worked nights in maternity. She saw both children. She may still have the original birth log, unless Vincent found her.
