Chapter 6 - The Missing Hour
David remembered the night his father died in fragments.
Rain.
A hospital corridor.
Evelyn’s hand around his wrist.
Serena crying into a blanket.
A doctor saying, “He may not remember.”
David had been seventeen. He woke the next morning with stitches above his eyebrow and no memory of the previous twelve hours.
Evelyn told him he had fallen down the basement stairs after hearing the news.
Now Jonah was saying he had been in the car.
“That’s impossible,” David said.
Jonah reached into his coat and handed him a photocopy of an emergency-room intake form.
Patient: David Cross.
Time: 11:42 p.m.
Injuries: concussion, glass lacerations, possible chemical sedation.
The hospital listed was forty miles from the location of Thomas’s crash.
The form had been sealed under a different surname.
“How did you get this?”
“A nurse kept copies after Evelyn paid the hospital to alter the record.”
David read the line again.
Chemical sedation.
“What happened?”
Jonah’s jaw tightened.
“I don’t know all of it. The man who found your father said there were two vehicles. Your father’s car went over the guardrail. The other car stopped long enough for someone to pull you from the passenger seat.”
“I was with him?”
“You were found unconscious in the second car.”
“Who was driving?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
The shadow behind the church door disappeared.
Detective Hale moved toward it, but the street outside was empty.
Back at the hospital, David confronted Maya with the medical form.
She had seen part of it before.
“Jonah showed me a photograph,” she admitted. “I didn’t tell you because you were already under pressure in Oslo.”
“What photograph?”
Maya opened a hidden cloud folder on her phone.
The image showed David at seventeen lying in a hospital bed. Serena stood at the foot of it, her face swollen from crying. Evelyn stood beside her.
In the background, reflected in a metal cabinet, was a fourth person.
A man in a dark coat.
David enlarged the image.
The man’s face remained unclear, but one detail was visible.
A gold ring shaped like a serpent.
David knew that ring.
His uncle, Victor Cross, wore it at every family gathering.
Victor was Thomas’s older brother and the current legal adviser to the Cross trust.
He had called David from Switzerland two days earlier to ask whether Maya and Noah were well.
At the time, the question seemed caring.
Now it sounded like surveillance.
David called Victor.
The call went straight to voicemail.
Hale checked travel records.
Victor had entered the country three weeks earlier.
No hotel booking.
No return flight.
The next morning, prosecutors charged Evelyn and Serena with theft, assault, unlawful imprisonment, and child endangerment. Their lawyers requested bail.
At the hearing, Evelyn appeared calm.
Her attorney argued that Maya had voluntarily given access to the apartment and finances. He suggested the security footage lacked context.
Then Maya entered the courtroom in a wheelchair.
Every head turned.
She wore the same torn cardigan David had held up on the call. The hospital had preserved it as evidence, but she had asked to wear it over her gown.
Evelyn stared.
Maya looked directly at the judge.
“I asked them to leave food for my baby,” she said. “They laughed.”
The prosecutor played the footage.
The judge denied bail.
As officers led Evelyn away, she turned toward David.
“Ask Jonah what happened to Elise,” she said.
Jonah, seated in the back row, went still.
Outside the courtroom, David grabbed his arm.
“Who is Elise?”
Jonah pulled free.
“My mother.”
“What happened to her?”
“She disappeared after giving birth to me.”
“Did Evelyn kill her?”
May you like
Jonah looked at him with an expression that was not anger but grief.
“No,” he said. “Thomas did.”
