The takeover suddenly looked bigger.
Everett looked at Morales.
“Where is Grant?”
“We’re still searching.”
Claire’s phone buzzed on the table.
Everyone froze.
Unknown number.
Claire looked at Morales.
Morales nodded.
“Don’t answer yet.”
The phone buzzed again.
A message appeared.
Claire read it.
Her face changed.
Natalie whispered, “What?”
Claire turned the screen.
It was a photograph.
Grant.
Sitting in what appeared to be the passenger seat of a car.
His lip was split.
Blood marked the collar of his white shirt.
His eyes were open.
Terrified.
Beneath the photograph was one sentence.
HE WAS NEVER IN CHARGE.
Everett stopped breathing.
Morales grabbed her phone.
“Do not respond.”
Another message arrived.
This one contained an address.
A storage facility forty miles north.
Then another sentence.
ASK EVERETT WHAT VICTORIA PUT IN THE BLUE FILE.
Claire slowly raised her eyes.
Every person in the room looked at Everett.
His face had gone gray.
Natalie stood.
“Dad?”
Everett said nothing.
Claire watched him.
“Everett.”
His hands started shaking.
Not from age.
From memory.
“What blue file?”
He looked at Claire.
For several seconds he seemed incapable of answering.
Then he whispered, “Your baby isn’t the first Whitmore grandchild Grant tried to use to take the company.”
Claire felt the room tilt.
Natalie stared at her father.
“What are you talking about?”
Everett’s eyes filled with something Claire had never seen there before.
Fear.
“Victoria found out before she died.”
“Found out what?”
Everett looked at the photograph of his bloodied son.
Then at Claire’s unborn child moving beneath the hospital blanket.
“When Grant was twenty-seven,” he said, “another woman was pregnant.”
Claire’s heart stopped for one beat.
Natalie whispered, “What?”
Everett swallowed.
“She disappeared before the baby was born.”
Claire stared.
“Disappeared?”
“I thought she left.”
“You thought?”
Everett looked toward Detective Morales.
“I was told she took money and moved overseas.”
“By whom?” Claire asked.
Everett’s answer was barely audible.
“Victoria.”
Another message hit Claire’s phone.
This time there was no photograph.
Only a video attachment.
Seven seconds long.
Morales moved closer.
“Don’t open it.”
But the preview image had already loaded.
Claire stared at the frozen frame.
A woman stood beside a hospital bed.
Blonde.
Young.
Pregnant.
Timestamp: eleven years earlier.
Beside her stood Victoria Whitmore.
Grant’s dead mother.
And in Victoria’s hands was a blue file.
Claire looked at Everett.
His chair scraped backward.
“No.”
Claire’s voice came out cold.
“You’ve seen this woman before.”
Everett’s face collapsed.
“No.”
“You know her.”
“No.”
“Everett.”
He shook his head.
Then Claire’s phone buzzed one final time.
A new message.
Five words.
CLAIRE, SHE NEVER LEFT AMERICA.
And beneath it was a second photograph.
Not eleven years old.
Taken yesterday.
The same woman.
Older now.
Standing beside a dark-haired boy who looked about ten.
A boy with Grant Whitmore’s eyes.
A boy holding a folder.
A blue folder.
On the hospital monitor beside Claire, her unborn daughter’s heartbeat began racing.
And Detective Morales whispered the question nobody in the room wanted answered.
“If that boy is Grant’s son… who has been hiding him for eleven years?”
Claire stared at the image.
Then she noticed the background.
Her blood turned cold.
The woman and the boy were standing outside St. Matthew’s Medical Center.
Outside the same hospital.
Outside the same maternity entrance Claire had used less than nine hours earlier.
The timestamp on the photograph read 7:16 a.m.
They had been downstairs.
While Claire was upstairs.
And somebody had known exactly where to find her.
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