Chapter 13 - THE BROTHER I NEVER KNEW
I didn't have a brother.
At least, that was what I had always believed.
My mother finally told me the truth.
Before me, she had a son.
Michael.
My older brother.
He disappeared when he was four.
My father claimed he had died from illness.
It was a lie.
Michael had witnessed something he wasn't supposed to see.
My father arranged for him to be taken away.
My mother spent years trying to find him.
Eventually she discovered that he had survived.
He had been adopted under another name.
I stared at her.
“Where is he?”
She gave me an address.
Three hours later, I stood outside a small house.
A man opened the door.
He looked like me.
Same eyes.
Same jaw.
Same expression.
He stared at me.
“Andrew?”
I nodded.
He stepped backward.
“My God.”
His name was Michael Reynolds.
He had grown up believing his biological parents were dead.
Our mother showed him the records.
He cried.
So did I.
We sat together for hours.
He told me about his life.
I told him about mine.
Eventually he asked about Clara.
I showed him a photograph.
He smiled.
“She looks strong.”
“She is.”
He looked at me.
“Are you happy?”
I thought about the ICU.
The hospital.
Our lost daughter.
The empire.
My father's crimes.
The family we had rebuilt.
“I am now.”
Michael nodded.
“I think I am too.”
For the first time, the Carter family had grown instead of shrinking.
But Michael carried one final piece of information.
He had a photograph from the year he disappeared.
Our father stood beside a third man.
A foreign banker named Victor Sloane.
Michael said:
“He was the man who took me.”
Victor Sloane had vanished twenty years earlier.
He was still alive.
May you like
And he had just moved back into the city.
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