Chapter 3
The letter was three pages long, front and back, written in that same messy, urgent handwriting. I unfolded it with shaking hands, and the first thing I saw was the date at the top—written in a different, newer ink, like she’d added it at the last minute.
July 27th. Tonight.
My Emily,
If you’re reading this, I’m either dead or I’ve been taken, and Noah is sitting right next to you, probably pretending he’s braver than he feels. Tell him I love him more than the stars and the moon and every stupid thing we’ve ever laughed at together. Tell him the fox was his dad’s, once, and that he was a good man even if he didn’t stay long enough to be a dad.
And Emily… I am so, so sorry.
I know you hate me. I know you have every right to. I left without a word twelve years ago, and I never called, never wrote, never sent a single text to let you know I was alive. I broke the promise we made in the dorm room that night—you know the one, when we drank that terrible cheap wine and swore we’d be maids of honor at each other’s weddings and godmothers to each other’s kids and that we’d never let a man or a baby or anything else come between us.
I broke it.
But I had to.
What I’m about to tell you is going to make you angry. It’s going to make you scream and cry and probably throw this letter across the room. And you’ll be right to do all of it. But before you do, you have to remember one thing: everything I did, I did to protect him. To protect both of you.
Do you remember that night in senior year? The night we went to that party in the Pearl District? The one where you got so drunk you couldn’t walk straight, and I left you on the couch with a bucket and went to get us water? And when I came back, you were gone? And you showed up at the dorm at six in the morning, crying so hard you could barely talk, and you said you’d made a terrible mistake and that you never wanted to talk about it again?
I stopped reading.
The room tilted.
Of course I remembered. I’d spent twelve years trying to forget. I’d buried it so deep under therapy and bad dates and long hours at the architecture firm that some days I could almost convince myself it had never happened. Almost. But every now and then, in the dark before sleep, I’d feel his hands on me again, and the smell of expensive whiskey and cedar, and I’d wake up gasping.
I’d never told anyone the details. Not the therapist. Not my sister. Not even Megan. I’d only told her I’d messed up, that I’d gone to a hotel room with a man whose name I didn’t know, and that I hated myself for it. She’d held me while I cried and never asked for more.
Or so I’d thought.
I forced myself to keep reading.
You never told me what happened that night. But I saw him leave the party. I saw him get into a black car with a driver waiting. And I recognized him. Everyone in Portland who watched the news recognized him. Richard Voss. He was thirty-nine back then, already rich, already married to that ice queen socialite of his, already on every charity billboard in the city.
I didn’t say anything because you didn’t want me to. Because you said if it got out, it would ruin your life. That nobody would believe the drunk college girl over the millionaire philanthropist. And you were right. He had money. He had lawyers. He had people who would have destroyed you just for saying his name out loud.
Six weeks later, you told me you were late.
Do you remember? You came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth and you just held up the pregnancy test and you couldn’t even speak. We sat on the bathroom floor for three hours while you cried and said your life was over. You said you couldn’t have a baby. You were twenty-one. You had your whole future ahead of you. You couldn’t be a single mom. You couldn’t tell your parents. You couldn’t tell anyone who the father was.
You decided to give the baby up for adoption.
I supported you. I drove you to the appointments. I held your hand through every ultrasound. I lied to your parents when they asked why you were gaining weight. I was with you in the delivery room when he was born—eleven years ago this October, seven pounds two ounces, ten fingers ten toes, the loudest lungs in the whole hospital. You held him for exactly forty-seven seconds. I counted. Then you kissed his forehead and you handed him to the social worker and you said, “Tell him his mother loved him enough to let him go.”
You went home. You graduated. You got the job at the architecture firm. You moved on. You never asked about him. You never wanted to know.
I couldn’t do that.
I couldn’t let him go to some random family who would never know how special he was. Who would never look at his eyes and see yours. So I did something unforgivable. I used the adoption agency’s open records policy—I volunteered to be his “mentor” through the church outreach program they partnered with. I got to see him once a month at first. Then once a week. Then the foster family he was with moved to Minnesota, and I couldn’t bear it.
I took him.
Not legally. Not the right way. I picked him up from daycare one Tuesday when he was ten months old, and I drove away. I changed our names. I moved from state to state. I worked cash jobs. I taught him to lie to teachers about where we lived and what his last name was. I made us ghosts. And for ten and a half years, it worked. We were happy. We were poor and tired and always looking over our shoulders, but we were ours.
I thought we were safe.
Three weeks ago, Voss found us.
I don’t know how. Maybe he ran a DNA test through one of those ancestry sites. Maybe one of my old friends slipped up. Maybe he’s been looking this whole time. It doesn’t matter. He found us. He showed up at Noah’s school in that black Suburban of his. He told the principal he was Noah’s biological father, that I was a kidnapper, that he had legal documents to prove it.
I got there five minutes before he could take Noah. We ran. We’ve been running ever since.
Voss doesn’t want Noah because he suddenly cares about being a dad. He wants him because his wife is dying of ovarian cancer and can’t have children, and his “legitimate” daughter got disinherited for marrying a woman, and he needs an heir. A male heir. Someone to carry on the Voss name and the Voss fortune. He sees Noah as a thing. A possession. A replacement for the family he lost.
And he will kill both of us before he lets anyone else have him.
Emily, I’m begging you. Don’t call the police. Don’t go to the lawyers. Don’t trust anyone in a suit who says they’re here to help. Voss owns half this city. He has people everywhere. The only thing he didn’t count on was you. He doesn’t know about you. He never knew you kept the pregnancy a secret. He thinks I’m Noah’s biological mother, and that his sperm-bank donor father is long gone.
You are the ace up my sleeve.
You are the only person who can prove Noah is his. You are the only person who can take Voss down. And more importantly… you are the only person Noah has left. If I’m gone, he’s yours. He was always yours, in every way that matters. I was just the babysitter with a car and a lot of bad decisions.
Look in the lining of his jacket. Under the Sharpie with your name on it, there’s a pocket I sewed in. Inside is a USB drive. It has everything. Every record. Every fake ID. Every photo I could get of Voss over the years. And most importantly… the birth certificate. The real one. With your name on it as mother. And a blank space for father.
I’m so sorry, Emily. For everything. For leaving. For lying. For dragging you into this nightmare. But I had no one else. You were always the strongest one of us. You were always the one who could build things and fix things and make everything okay just by walking into a room.
Please fix this.
Please keep my boy safe.
Love always,
Megan
I dropped the letter.
It fluttered to the floor, the pages spreading open like a dying bird. Noah was watching me, his face pale, his lower lip caught between his teeth. He knew. He’d known all along.
“Am I really yours?” he whispered.
I couldn’t speak. I could only nod.
The lady with two eyes.
It was never a silly nickname. It was a clue. A breadcrumb. A way for him to know. We had the same eyes—the same impossible shade of blue-gray, the same tiny fleck of amber in the iris of the left eye, the same long dark lashes that people always complimented. I’d looked at my reflection a thousand times and never once thought I was seeing my son’s face looking back.
I sank to my knees next to the bed and pulled him into my arms again. He wrapped himself around me like he was trying to crawl inside my skin, and for the first time in eleven years, I felt complete. Like a part of me I hadn’t even known was missing had just clicked back into place.
“I’m sorry,” I said into his hair. “I’m so, so sorry I didn’t know. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“Mom—Megan—said you did the hardest thing anyone could ever do,” he mumbled against my shoulder. “She said you gave me up because you loved me so much you wanted me to have a better life. And then she spent eleven years making sure I got it.”
The door burst open.
It wasn’t the nurse. It wasn’t Detective Alvarez.
It was a man in a tailored charcoal suit, expensive shoes, a Rolex glinting on his left wrist. His hair was silver at the temples, his face handsome in the cold, sharp way that old money always is. He was flanked by two other men in identical dark suits, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses even though it was nearly one in the morning.
May you like
He smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes.
“Hello, Noah,” he said. His voice was deep, smooth, like melted chocolate laced with arsenic. “I’m Richard Voss. And I believe you have something that belongs to me.”
