Chương 3
Not recent ones.
Claire had kept the beginning.
Dominic in a dark T-shirt on the steps of a brownstone. Dominic laughing beside a borrowed motorcycle. Dominic asleep on a sofa with Claire’s foot resting on his chest. In one photograph, he was kneeling in a church basement, helping an old man repair a folding table. It had been taken before power changed the way strangers looked at him.
A picture had been removed from the final page. The adhesive marks were fresh.
“Who took the missing photograph?” Nadia asked.
Ivy pointed toward Margaret.
The older woman’s posture collapsed by less than an inch.
“I removed nothing.”
Ivy’s lips pressed together.
Nadia did not challenge either of them. She wrote something on her form.
The girls needed to go to the hospital. They were dehydrated and mildly malnourished, though neither appeared critically ill. Because Dominic’s paternity had not been established, he could not simply take them. Because Margaret was a maternal relative but potentially involved in their concealment, she would not be given emergency placement either.
Margaret stood. “I am their grandmother.”
Nadia’s expression remained neutral. “That will be considered.”
“They know me.”
Skye shrank against Dominic.
Ivy said, “She made Mommy cry.”
The room went still again.
Margaret’s face tightened with pain or anger; Dominic could not tell which.
“She’s three,” Ethan said. “She doesn’t understand adult conversations.”
Ivy turned on him. “I understand you lie.”
Lauren looked at her husband.
Ethan’s mouth opened.
Nothing emerged.
At the hospital, Dominic sat between the girls’ beds while nurses brought warm blankets, apple juice, and socks with rubber grips. He signed nothing except acknowledgment that he had no current legal custody. When a nurse asked whether the twins had allergies, he had to say he did not know.
The shame of that answer was irrational. He had not known they existed. Still, it felt like a failure.
Ivy drank too quickly and vomited into a plastic basin. She apologized afterward.
“You don’t apologize for being sick,” Dominic said.
“Mommy said sorry.”
“When?”
“All the time.”
He wiped Ivy’s mouth with a damp cloth. His hands were built for larger things. The cloth seemed absurdly small between his tattooed fingers.
Skye watched him from the other bed. “Are you mad?”
“At you?”
She nodded.
“No.”
“At Mommy?”
The truthful answer would have required words he did not have.
“I’m sad she was alone.”
“She wasn’t.” Skye pointed toward herself and Ivy.
Dominic lowered his eyes. “No. She wasn’t.”
Margaret arrived with Ethan and Lauren but was not permitted inside the treatment room. Dominic saw her through the narrow window in the door. She sat upright in a vinyl chair, hands folded over her handbag, appearing like a woman waiting for a delayed flight rather than one whose daughter’s body had just been removed from a house she claimed had been empty.
Lauren entered alone after speaking with the social worker.
“I brought clothes,” she said.
She held a paper hospital bag containing two pairs of leggings, shirts, underwear, and small sneakers purchased from an all-night store. The clothes were not identical.
“I didn’t know their sizes,” she added. “The woman at the store guessed.”
Ivy turned her face away.
Lauren set the bag on a chair. “I am sorry I grabbed the box.”
No response.
“I thought you had taken jewelry from the house.”
“It was Mommy’s.”
“I know that now.”
“You didn’t ask.”
Lauren’s polished face changed. “No. I didn’t.”
She sat near the door but did not move closer.
Dominic studied her. Lauren Whitmore had always been eager to enter rooms that were not hers, conversations that did not concern her, and decisions that gave her proximity to influence. He had dismissed her as decorative ambition in a dark green dress. That judgment had been easy. Easy judgments usually contained laziness.
“Why did you come to the house today?” he asked.
“Ethan said his mother wanted to list it.”
“You insisted on entering before the broker arrived.”
Lauren looked toward the glass, where Margaret’s profile remained visible. “Margaret told me Claire left some things behind. She said I could have the dining set.”
Dominic waited.
Lauren adjusted the cuff of her dress. “She also said there might be documents Ethan had forgotten to remove.”
“What documents?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Did Ethan know?”
“I don’t know what Ethan knows anymore.”
Her voice stayed smooth, but she had twisted the fabric at her wrist until the seam pulled white.
Dominic looked at the hospital bag. “Thank you for the clothes.”
Lauren rose. At the door, she paused.
“When the pendant came out,” she said, “Ethan didn’t look surprised that it existed. He looked surprised that it was there.”
She left before Dominic could ask more.
At three in the morning, temporary placement was arranged with an emergency foster family experienced with sibling groups. Dominic objected once, firmly. Nadia explained that paternity testing, a home assessment, and a preliminary safety review could begin immediately, but the girls could not legally leave with a man they had met hours earlier, especially one whose name generated three pages of law-enforcement cautions in the county database.
“You looked me up,” Dominic said.
“I would look up anyone.”
“You found accusations.”
“I found risk factors.”
“No convictions involving children, domestic violence, or weapons.”
“No conviction doesn’t mean no risk.”
His attorney started to intervene.
Dominic raised one hand.
He knew what Nadia saw: nightclub ownership, union investigations, associates with federal records, cash-heavy businesses, security teams, sealed warrants, a brother killed outside a restaurant eleven years earlier, and photographs of Dominic leaving funerals where half the mourners had declined to speak to police.
He also knew that intimidation would confirm every fear in the room.
May you like
“What do you need from me?” he asked.
Nadia’s shoulders lowered slightly. “A residence inspection. Identification. A voluntary drug screening. A list of adults with access to the home. Consent for the children’s medical team to share records once paternity is established. And patience.”
