Chapter 3 - The Hidden Digits
I waited until my mother drifted out to the backyard patio to join the boys and hand out extra paper plates. The moment the screen door latched shut behind her, I locked the front entry from the inside, hurried back to the master bedroom, and pulled the crumpled note and the silver bracelet out of my pocket.
I carried them over to my desk under the window where the afternoon sun provided sharp, uncompromising light.
I smoothed out the paper and read the rest of the message, which I had been too terrified to process earlier:
Mom, please don't show this to anyone until you finish reading it. Don't trust Grandma. You won't believe what happened 18 years ago. Rowan didn't die in that hospital. Grandma gave him away to settle a debt with the clinic director whose own baby was stillborn that same night. I have the adoption file. Meet me at the old boathouse by the lake at sunset. Come alone.
The room began to spin.
Didn't die. Given away.
The medical records. The death certificate. The small, closed casket that I had never had the strength to open because my mother told me it was too painful, because she lovingly handled the funeral home arrangements while I lay in a darkened room staring at the ceiling.
I picked up the silver bracelet again and looked closely at the faint, scratched numbers on the back. They weren't a random serial number. They were coordinates—or a locker number.
Wait.
I grabbed my phone, opened the maps application, and typed in the numbers scratched into the silver band: 41.8781, -87.6298—no, wait, those were city coordinates. Let me look closer at the engraving. It wasn't GPS coordinates. It was a local storage facility locker code and pin: Locker 408, Route 12 Storage.
Route 12 Storage was a bleak, twenty-four-hour facility located about ten miles outside town, right near the old lake boathouse mentioned in the letter.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. Who wrote the note? Who knew about this?
Could it be Leo or Mason? No, the handwriting was mature, firm, and distinctly unfamiliar. But the signature at the bottom of the page—though I hadn't noticed it before—was scrawled with a single, chilling initial: R.
Rowan.
If he was alive... if my baby boy hadn't died in that sterile hospital room eighteen years ago...
May you like
Another loud knock echoed through the front of the house.
I gasped, dropping the note onto the desk. I hurried out of the bedroom and looked down the stairs. Through the frosted glass of the front door, I saw a tall silhouette standing on the porch. It wasn't a guest for the party. It was a courier in a gray uniform, holding a heavy manila envelope.
