I make the decision and enter. The lobby is just as I remember it. Not a damn thing has changed. It’s empty except for a single row of orange plastic chairs stationed near the window and a man in a uniform sitting behind a wooden desk. He yawns as he looks up from his computer screen.
“Can I help you?”
He’s young—has the same kind of face as Sean Jenson, except his cheeks are fuller and still rosy with baby fat. But unlike Sean, or Officer Calvin Holston as I first knew him, this man is an actual cop.
“I need to report a crime.”
His shoulders straighten and draw back. His gaze sharpens. I have his attention now. “Yeah? What’s that?”
I only hesitate for a second, just long enough to take a deep breath and let it out before I say, “Mine.”
Chapter 52
BAILEY
One Year Later
Cora moves easier than when I last saw her. Freer. Her legs don’t shake with every step. Her feet no longer flop like she’s wading through a foot of wet cement. Her gait isn’t perfect—one foot still turns in, and she wobbles if she walks too fast—but there’s a steadiness that wasn’t there before. A rhythm.
The biggest change is in her expressions. Her lips curve in a way they didn’t before. Her eyebrows rise, and her dimples crease. When she smiles, it’s like her entire face glows, and it’s so good to see.
It’s not the same for her mother. Sure, Maria Jenson doesn’t look at her daughter like a leaf that might blow away at any minute like she used to. She doesn’t clutch Cora’s hand as tight. Yet there’s a weight in her gaze that wasn’t there before. A grief I understand all too well. She misses her husband. And Zane is gone because of me. I needed to give her something in return.
It didn’t take me long to make the decision.
The more I studied MLD, the more I tilted. Just like Zane said, it’s a disease like quicksand; it swallows its victims slowly, inch by horrible inch until they’re nothing more than a shell with a soul trappedinside. All of this is due to a gene mutation that swamps the brain in a coating of fat it can’t break down. The nerves die. Brain signals can’t get out. To lose your child in this way is a horror I can’t imagine.
Even after losing my own.
Noah died without warning—there one second, gone the next—ripped away in the blink of an eye. His loss along with Ethan’s was, and always will be, the very worst moment of my life. But I didn’t have to watch either of them suffer before they died. I didn’t have to watch them fight for movement or struggle for breath as they went deaf and blind. They were simply … gone.
Yes, it’s true Zane betrayed me, that he cuffed me to a chair and threatened to jam steel splinters beneath my fingernails if I didn’t give him Reed’s money. He took advantage of my desperation and used it to relieve his own. He did what he thought he had to do to save his child in the same way I’d done what I thought I had to do to avenge the death of mine. It made him dangerous. But he’s not anymore.
You’re safe now. They won’t bother you again.
I read Reed’s email a week after returning to Seattle. I’d told myself I was done with Avery Carter, that I’d never go back to her again. Which was why I’d opened my inbox in the first place—to erase the account. And there it was, the subject line sandwiched between a bunch of junk mail halfway down the page.
Bailey, please read this.
I nearly deleted it, but I couldn’t. I had to know what it said. And it nearly tore my heart out. There were no justifications in his words, no excuses, only pain for what he’d done. Pain I could literally feel bleeding through the screen with every word. I read it with tears in my eyes, and when I reached the end, I almost didn’t register the meaning behind the final line.You’re safe now.When I did, I nearly dropped the phone.
Zane and Sean were never coming home. It’s why I hadn’t heard a word from either of them since I’d fled the cabin. It’s why I hadn’twoken in the middle of the night with a gun to my head or wound up bleeding out in an alley. They were dead—both of them. Cora wasn’t, and I could do something to keep it that way.
I looked into the European gene therapy. It appeared promising. More than promising. Zane was right. It actually seemed to work. I watched video after video of MLD parents weeping with joy when their kids walked again and talked again. Kids whose paralysis melted away like butter. I could withhold that from Zane, sure. After what he’d done to me, I despised the man. But how could I withhold that from his daughter? How could I withhold that from his widow? If someone had the power to bring back my son, wouldn’t I give anything,doanything, to make that happen? I knew I would—but I didn’t have the power to save Noah.
I did have the power to save Cora.
I established a confidential trust and named Maria as the sole beneficiary. Then I sent her the money. Three million in total—two-and-a-half million for the treatment and another five-hundred thousand for the recovery. I left a single anonymous note in the remittance line:Save your daughter.
And she did.
I split what was left between Reed’s victims. There were the ones I already knew about—Rachel Dawson, Lacey Grayson, and Jennifer Stewart—and two I didn’t, both revealed by Reed in his email. Five women in all: two-hundred thousand each. It wasn’t enough to erase the anguish of what Reed had done to them, but it was a start.
Just like today is a start. A new beginning.
I return my attention to Maria and Cora. They’re at the park, having a picnic. Cora sits at the table as Maria covers it with a checkered tablecloth. Maria pulls sandwiches from a wicker basket and sets them on two plates and then hands one to her daughter while saying something that makes Cora throw her head back in a laugh.
“She’s doing so much better,” Ben says in awe as he stares at the girl.
