Chapter 13 - Forty-Seven Minutes)
The drive to St. Catherine's took eleven minutes with a police escort.
For Elena, it lasted seven years.
She sat beside Adrian in the rear of an unmarked car, gripping Cameron's torn sleeve. Caleb, Connor, and Cole were safe with Naomi and Celeste. Elena had left them only after Caleb took her face between his hands and repeated the promise she had given them during every hospital emergency.
We stay together, even when one of us has to go ahead.
The abandoned hospital annex rose beside the river like a dark ship. Most windows had been boarded. Police entered from the street while Adrian and Elena followed an officer through a loading bay. Water dripped from broken pipes. Old directional signs still pointed toward maternity, imaging, and research.
Elena remembered being rolled through those corridors, half conscious, asking whether all four babies were breathing.
A door slammed below them.
They descended to the ambulance tunnel. At the far end, headlights came alive. A white medical van accelerated toward the river exit.
“Cameron,” Elena screamed.
Adrian ran into the lane before the officer could stop him. The van swerved. Its mirror struck Adrian's shoulder and spun him to the ground. Police vehicles blocked the exit. The driver braked, reversed, and crashed into a concrete column.
Elena reached the rear doors.
They were locked.
She struck the glass with both hands. Inside, Cameron lay strapped to a gurney. His eyes were open. Tape covered his mouth, but he kicked one sneaker against the metal frame when he saw her.
An officer broke the lock. Elena climbed inside and tore away the tape.
“Mom,” Cameron gasped. “I didn't cry.”
“You could have. You can always cry.”
She freed his arms and held him so tightly he complained that she was squashing him. She did not loosen her grip.
Adrian climbed into the van, one arm hanging painfully at his side. Cameron reached for him.
“Dad.”
The word stopped everyone.
Adrian gathered both Elena and Cameron against him with his uninjured arm. His forehead rested against his son's hair.
“I'm here,” he said. “We are both here.”
The driver was one of the men from the boathouse. Police arrested him. The second attendant surrendered inside the annex. Dr. Sloane was not among them.
They found his underground laboratory empty.
Refrigerators had been cleared. Computers burned in metal bins. On a wall remained photographs of the boys' embryonic scans and pages of genetic comparisons. Four columns carried the codes H1 through H4. A fifth column had been cut away with a knife.
The timer on a portable incinerator showed forty-seven minutes remaining.
“He intended to destroy everything and leave with Cameron before it finished,” an investigator said.
Elena looked at the timer. Forty-seven minutes. The exact length of Cameron's disappearance from the neonatal unit.
Inside the van, police recovered blood tubes, forged travel documents, and four passports bearing four different photographs of Cameron under four different names. Sloane had prepared multiple escape routes.
They also found Evelyn's phone beneath the driver's seat.
At the hospital, doctors confirmed Cameron had been given only a mild sedative. Adrian's shoulder was dislocated, but he refused treatment until all four boys had been brought to the same room.
When the three brothers arrived, they piled onto Cameron's bed. Caleb cried openly. Connor checked Cameron's wrists for injuries. Cole announced that he had memorized the sedan's license plate but had gotten two numbers wrong.
Cameron told the story with increasing grandeur. By the third version, he had escaped three ropes and kicked a dangerous scientist into a wall.
Elena let him have the victory.
Evelyn arrived under guard shortly before dawn.
Adrian stepped into the corridor to meet her. One of her wrists was cuffed to a belt beneath a borrowed coat. She looked older than she had six hours earlier.
“I told them where the annex was,” she said. “My attorneys believe that should be recorded.”
“It has been.”
“May I see him?”
“No.”
Pain moved through her face. Adrian almost mistook it for proof that she had changed. Then he remembered that love could be real and still be used as a weapon.
“You protected your control,” he said. “Tonight you helped protect Cameron. One does not erase the other.”
“I know.”
It was the first time Evelyn had accepted a judgment without replacing it with her own.
She gave him the password to an encrypted Helix Crown account. “Sloane kept a private archive. He believed the children proved something about the treatment Elena received. I financed his research because I thought it would help me challenge the birth records. I did not know he had designed the pregnancy.”
Adrian stared at her. “Designed?”
“Find the fifth file.”
Officers led her away.
Inside the room, the boys had made space for Adrian on the bed. Elena stood beside the window as sunrise colored the East River.
“Is it over?” Caleb asked.
Adrian looked at the four faces that had transformed a restroom mirror into a door back to his life.
“The part where you wonder if I am coming back is over,” he said.
May you like
Caleb considered this, then nodded.
For that morning, it was enough.
