Chapter 10
I dropped the phone.
Emily caught it before it hit the floor.
“Dad?”
Silence answered.
Then the call ended.
My husband, Richard, had died five years earlier.
I had identified his body after a boating accident.
Or I thought I had.
Bear stared at me.
“You knew?”
“No.”
He wanted to believe me, but forty-five years of pain stood between us.
Jo traced the call to a private medical facility outside Memphis.
Daniel had been released less than an hour after his arrest.
The official record called it an evidence error.
Emily looked at the stolen documents.
“If Dad is alive, whose body did we bury?”
Nobody answered.
Sophie appeared in the doorway wearing Bear’s oversized jacket.
“Grandma, Grandpa visited me.”
Emily knelt before her.
“When?”
“Last Christmas. Daddy said not to tell you.”
She described an older man with a scar near his left eyebrow.
Richard had that scar.
He had watched us grieve while secretly meeting Daniel.
Sophie handed me a folded napkin.
“I wrote down the numbers Grandpa said.”
They formed coordinates.
Bear entered them into a map.
The location was an isolated lake house registered to one of Daniel’s companies.
Emily took my hand.
“Mom, I need to know why Dad did this.”
Bear shook his head.
“It could be a trap.”
“It is,” I said. “But Richard expects me to run.”
For most of my life, powerful men had decided what truth I was allowed to know.
My father stole my child.
My husband stole decades.
Daniel tried to steal my daughter and granddaughter.
I looked at Bear.
“I won’t run again.”
May you like
After a long silence, he picked up his keys.
“Then you’re not going alone.”
