“Don’t.” My voice cracked. “Don’t call me that right now.”
Pain flashed across his face.
But he nodded.
I turned away, trying to breathe.
Everything I believed about my life suddenly felt unstable.
My marriage.
My past.
My family.
All of it cracked open in a single night.
Then Adrian spoke again.
Quietly.
“There’s more.”
I closed my eyes.
Of course there was.
I turned slowly toward him.
“What now?”
Adrian looked more uncertain than I had seen him all evening.
That frightened me.
He reached into a drawer beside the fireplace.
And removed a thin manila folder.
Old.
Worn.
Handled many times.
He held it carefully.
“Three months ago,” he said, “my investigators finally uncovered why your trail disappeared after Chicago.”
A terrible feeling settled in my stomach.
“What do you mean?”
Adrian swallowed once.
Then handed me the folder.
Inside was a birth certificate.
My hands froze.
The paper trembled violently between my fingers.
Date: February 3rd, 1997.
Mother: Eleanor Hart.
Father:
Blank.
Below it was a hospital record.
And one final page.
An adoption transfer.
I stopped breathing.
No.
No.
I looked up at Adrian.
His eyes were full of grief.
“You had a daughter,” he whispered.
The room tilted beneath me.
“That’s impossible.”
“You gave birth seven months after I disappeared.”
I shook my head violently.
“No. I would remember—”
Then memory hit.
Not fully.
Fragments.
Hospital lights.
Sedatives.
My father signing papers.
Someone telling me the baby died.
My knees nearly gave out.
Adrian caught me before I hit the floor.
And as the truth shattered the last remaining pieces of the life I thought I understood, he whispered the words that changed everything.
“She’s alive.”
The rain crashed harder against the windows.
And somewhere far below, hidden in the darkness of Manhattan, a daughter neither of us knew existed had been living her entire life without us.
But the most terrifying part was still to come.
Because Adrian’s investigators had discovered one more thing.
Someone else had been searching for her too.
And according to the file in my shaking hands…
They had found her first.
