Chapter 6
I counted the marks.
One thousand and ninety-four.
My son had made a calendar out of survival.
I touched the wall and broke.
Not elegantly.
Not quietly.
I fell to my knees in the hidden room and sobbed until Hannah knelt beside me.
“He’s alive,” she whispered.
“I was upstairs.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have.”
She did not argue.
That was mercy.
Detective Reeves found a second recorder hidden beneath loose floorboards.
Oliver had recorded footsteps.
Victoria’s threats.
Edmund’s visits.
A doctor’s voice.
Dr. Malcolm Price.
Our family physician.
The man who signed Oliver’s death certificate.
The man who told me grief could cause hallucinations when I swore I heard tapping in the walls.
I remembered that day.
I had stood in the hallway, hand pressed to wallpaper, whispering Oliver’s name.
Victoria had called Dr. Price.
He injected me with something “to calm me.”
After that, I slept for sixteen hours.
My son had been calling.
They drugged me so I would stop hearing him.
Dr. Price was arrested trying to leave town.
He confessed faster than the others.
Cowardice can be useful when squeezed.
He named adoption agencies.
Judges.
Lawyers.
A private maternity home.
And one woman still alive.
Elise.
Hannah’s mother.
Hannah dropped the coffee cup she was holding.
It shattered across the hospital floor.
“My mother is dead.”
Dr. Price’s statement said otherwise.
Elise had been declared dead after the boating accident.
But no body was recovered.
Edmund had paid for the certificate.
Detective Reeves looked at Hannah gently.
“We have a possible location.”
Hannah stared at me.
May you like
I took her hand.
“Then we go.”
