Chapter 5 - The Man Who Walked Out of Fire
Detective Hale traced the package to a courier who had been paid in cash by a man wearing a baseball cap and medical mask. Security footage showed only part of his face.
The scar near his chin matched the photograph.
Jonah was in the city.
David wanted to search for him immediately, but Maya stopped him.
“You don’t know what he wants.”
“He warned you.”
“He also broke into the lake house records, stole sealed adoption files, and followed Serena for three weeks.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s dangerous.”
“It means he’s desperate.”
Maya told David how Jonah first contacted her.
The email contained a photograph of Thomas holding a newborn in front of St. Gabriel’s. The message said:
Your husband has a brother his mother erased.
Maya assumed it was a scam. Then Jonah sent copies of Thomas’s letters and a DNA match from a genealogy database. The match linked Jonah to a distant Cross cousin with a probability too high to ignore.
Maya agreed to meet him at a public café.
“He knew things about your childhood,” she said. “The scar on your knee. The song your father played when he was sad. The wooden boat in the attic.”
David remembered the boat. Thomas had carved two names into the hull.
David and J.
Evelyn told him the J stood for joy.
He had believed her.
“What did Jonah say happened at the lake house?”
“He went there to search for records. Someone locked him inside and set the back room on fire.”
“Did he see who?”
“No. But he received a call minutes before the fire. A woman told him he should have stayed buried.”
David looked toward the glass wall of the neonatal unit. Noah slept beneath a warming light, one tiny fist resting near his cheek.
“Why did Evelyn say Noah was proof?”
Maya’s eyes filled with tears.
“She took a hairbrush from our bathroom.”
“For DNA?”
“I think so.”
A cold pressure formed behind David’s ribs.
“Proof of what?”
Maya whispered, “That you’re Thomas’s son.”
David stared at her.
“I am.”
“I know. But Jonah said the Cross estate was structured strangely. If Thomas had more than one biological son, control of the family trust would be divided.”
David had never thought about the trust. Evelyn managed it. She gave him quarterly statements and said he could assume control at forty.
He was thirty-four.
“If Jonah is recognized,” Maya continued, “your mother loses majority power.”
“And Noah?”
“If anything happened to you, Noah would inherit your share.”
The meaning became clear.
Evelyn had not simply hated Maya.
She saw Maya and Noah as obstacles between herself and permanent control of the Cross fortune.
That evening, Hale called.
“We found Jonah.”
David met him at an abandoned church near the east side.
Rain drummed against broken stained-glass windows. The pews were covered with dust. A single lamp burned near the altar.
Jonah stood in the aisle.
He looked older than in the photograph. Thinner. The scar near his chin was deeper in person.
David stopped ten feet away.
For a moment, neither man spoke.
Then Jonah said, “You have his posture.”
“You have his eyes.”
Jonah laughed without humor.
“That’s what Evelyn said before she had me removed.”
David took out Thomas’s watch.
“You sent this.”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From the man who pulled your father out of the car before it exploded.”
David’s throat tightened.
“My father died at the scene.”
“No. He was alive for nineteen minutes.”
Jonah moved closer.
“And he named the person who ran him off the road.”
“Evelyn?”
Jonah shook his head.
“Serena.”
David felt the floor tilt beneath him.
“My sister was fourteen.”
“She was in the passenger seat.”
“Then who was driving?”
Jonah looked toward the church entrance.
May you like
A shadow moved behind the frosted glass.
“You were,” he said.
