“What did you do?”
“I left the envelope on the hotel bed. I took my own car.”
“Where did you go?”
“To my aunt’s house in Vermont.”
“And after that?”
“Ohio. Then Missouri. Finally here.”
“Six years,” he whispered.
The words filled the room.
“I thought you wanted me gone.”
“And I thought you left because you were carrying Michael’s child.”
I flinched.
“Who told you that?”
“Warren.”
Of course.
Ethan’s eyes moved toward the door.
Toward Theo.
“He showed me photographs of you and Michael leaving a clinic.”
“That was a prenatal clinic.”
“I did not know.”
“Michael drove me because I was dizzy.”
“Warren said Michael had been seeing you for months.”
“He lied.”
“Yes.”
We stood inside the ruins of a lie large enough to have separated two people and hidden a child for six years.
“What did your mother say after I left?” I asked.
Ethan’s expression closed.
“That you had chosen someone else.”
“Did you believe her?”
“At first.”
“And later?”
“I looked for you.”
The answer came immediately.
My throat tightened.
“How long?”
“Every day for two years. Then every week. Then whenever someone claimed they had seen you.”
“I changed my name.”
“I know.”
I had become Emma Hart in public records.
Emily Brooks had disappeared.
Not illegally.
Not completely.
Just enough for someone with ordinary resources to lose the trail.
Ethan did not have ordinary resources.
“How did you not find me?”
“I almost did.”
The room went cold.
“When?”
“Four years ago. A private investigator found a rental application in Indiana under the name Emma Hart.”
My pulse shifted.
I had lived in Indiana for three months.
“Why did you stop?”
“He was killed in a car accident two days later.”
I stared at him.
Ethan’s voice dropped.
“The file disappeared from his office.”
The old fear returned.
Not the fear of Ethan.
The fear of the people around him.
“You think someone prevented you from finding me.”
“I know someone did.”
“How?”
“Because three investigators received the same anonymous warning.”
“What warning?”
He looked directly at me.
“That if I found you, you would lose the child.”
My fingers went numb.
“They knew about Theo?”
“Not by name. Only that you had a boy.”
The room seemed suddenly too small for air.
“Who sent it?”
“I never found out.”
“Your mother?”
“She denied knowing you were pregnant.”
“She gave me money.”
“She said she gave you money to leave me because you asked for it.”
“I never asked.”
“I know that now.”
We both fell silent.
The danger was no longer contained in the past.