Chapter 11 - MY FATHER’S DOOR
I imagined a hundred versions of our reunion.
None looked like reality.
The apartment was small.
The curtains were closed.
A lamp burned beside an old leather chair.
When the door opened, the man standing there looked twenty years older than the father I remembered.
His hair had turned almost completely gray.
A scar crossed his left cheek.
But his eyes were the same.
“Claire.”
I didn’t speak.
I hit him.
Not hard.
Just once across the chest.
Then I collapsed into his arms.
He held me while I cried.
“I’m sorry.”
He whispered.
“I’m so sorry.”
I wanted to scream at him.
Instead, I introduced him to his granddaughter.
My father held Emma as though she were made of glass.
For several minutes, nobody mentioned Mercer.
Then he looked at Luka.
“You kept your promise.”
Luka nodded.
“Barely.”
My father almost smiled.
We sat around the small kitchen table.
“Tell me about M-18.”
I said.
My father’s expression changed.
“M-17 proves Ethan was the stolen infant.”
“M-18 proves he learned the truth and chose to protect the crime.”
“How?”
“When Ethan was nineteen, Hannah Cole contacted him.”
Vanessa’s mother.
“She wanted her son back?”
“She wanted to meet him.”
“She never asked for money.”
“She only wanted him to know who he was.”
My father opened a file.
Inside was a photograph of a gentle-looking woman in her forties.
“Hannah discovered Ethan’s identity by accident.”
“She contacted him privately.”
“Ethan agreed to meet.”
My throat tightened.
“What happened?”
“She disappeared two days later.”
Luka stared at my father.
“You told me Hannah moved overseas.”
“I lied.”
My father placed another photograph on the table.
A burned vehicle.
“Hannah was inside.”
I felt cold.
“Did Ethan kill her?”
“I don’t know.”
“But I know he was there.”
He handed me a toll-camera photograph.
Ethan’s car had followed Hannah’s vehicle onto a rural highway.
The time stamp was less than an hour before her death.
“Why wasn’t he arrested?”
“Richard Mercer buried the investigation.”
“And Vanessa?”
My father sighed.
“She was seventeen.”
“She believed her mother died in an accident.”
I remembered Vanessa standing beside Ethan.
Suddenly I wondered whether she was using him.
Or whether he was using her.
Then my father reached into the file and removed a handwritten letter.
The name on the front was mine.
“You need to read this.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Hannah.”
I opened it.
The first line made my hands shake.
Claire, if anything happens to me, Ethan already knows who he really is.
The second line was worse.
May you like
And he knows exactly what his father did to your father.
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