Chapter 10
Ruiz refused to let Dad leave the hospital.
Rebecca agreed with her.
I didn’t.
“Someone else knows where she is,” I said. “What if Hale reaches her first?”
Ruiz arranged for Oklahoma police to check the address.
They found an empty rental house.
The woman called Grace had left two days earlier.
Her landlord said she had lived there for almost five years.
She rarely spoke to anyone.
She worked nights at a nursing home.
She had scars along the left side of her face and walked with a limp.
Dad began crying before the landlord finished.
Mom had injured her left leg in college.
She still limped when she was tired.
The landlord found a photograph in the abandoned bedroom.
It showed Noah and me at a Dallas Christmas parade the previous year.
Mom had been watching us.
“She knew we were alive,” I said.
Dad looked destroyed.
“There has to be a reason she stayed away.”
Ruiz asked local police to search transportation stations.
A clerk remembered Grace buying a bus ticket to Dallas.
She was coming toward us.
Dad was discharged under protest two days later.
We returned to Rebecca’s house with private security.
The broken window had been repaired.
The threat was gone.
But safety felt like another lie adults told children.
Dad slept on the couch because he couldn’t climb the stairs.
I woke after midnight and heard him speaking in the kitchen.
“I know you’re alive,” he said into his phone. “Please call me.”
He had left dozens of messages on Mom’s old number.
I sat beside him.
“What will you say if she comes back?”
“That I’m sorry.”
“For marrying Melissa?”
“For not believing Sarah. For not believing you.”
His phone rang.
Unknown number.
Dad answered immediately.
No one spoke.
Then we heard breathing.
“Sarah?”
A woman began crying.
Dad nearly dropped the phone.
“Where are you?”
“I can’t come home.”
It was Mom’s voice.
Older.
Frightened.
But hers.
I grabbed Dad’s arm.
Mom whispered, “Mercer knows I’m alive.”
“We can protect you.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Sarah, the children need you.”
Silence.
Then she said my name.
“Emma?”
“I’m here, Mom.”
The word Mom barely came out.
“Why didn’t you come back?”
“I tried.”
A door slammed on her end.
Mom gasped.
A man shouted.
The call ended.
Ruiz traced it to a bus station south of Dallas.
We drove there with police.
A bus from Tulsa had arrived twenty minutes earlier.
Security footage showed Mom stepping onto the platform.
A man followed her.
Grant Hale.
Outside, officers found blood beside an abandoned taxi.
No body.
Dad leaned against the station wall.
Ruiz searched the taxi.
She found Mom’s necklace on the floor.
A scrap of fabric was caught in the trunk latch.
“He took her,” I said.
Noah held Dad’s hand.
Dad looked at Ruiz.
“You have to find my wife.”
Ruiz’s phone rang.
Her expression changed as she listened.
“What happened?” Rebecca asked.
“Thomas Carter escaped during a transfer.”
At the same moment, my phone vibrated.
A photograph appeared from an unknown number.
Mom sat tied to a chair.
Thomas stood behind her wearing his silver bull ring.
The message beneath it contained an address and a demand.
Bring the blue box.
May you like
Come alone, Emma.
Or watch your mother die twice.
