Someone called out, “Joe!”
It was Edwards. Joe struggled to his feet and walked to meet him.
“What is it?” Joe’s eyes burned from the ash floating in the air.
“Come to the station. There’s good news.”
How could there be good news?Joe wondered wearily as he picked his way over broken glass and rubble.
“What’s happened?” he asked, following mindlessly.
Edwards stopped and turned. “Ethan was found. He’s safe, and he’s at the station.”
All the blood in Joe’s body slowed to a crawl through his veins. “What did you say?”
Edwards repeated himself, and Joe blinked a few times, fighting to wake from the nightmare that still held him in its cruel grasp.
“Who found him?” Joe asked.
“Jeremy Mikhailov. Ethan was floating on a rooftop in the bay, still in his carriage. It was pure luck. Or maybe a miracle.”
Joe dropped to his knees in the middle of the street, cupped his hands together, and pressed them to his forehead. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Edwards waited for Joe to get up. Then they ran to the station to meet Jeremy.
CHAPTER 26
Juneau
2017
Gwen paused with her fork hovering over Jane’s chicken potpie. “It wasn’t Valerie’s baby in the newspaper photograph,” she said, her pulse drumming a rapid beat. “It was Angie’s baby.”
“Yes,” Jeremy replied.
“But what about Cameron? Was he ever found?”
Jeremy nodded soberly. “His body was recovered the next morning, inside one of the flooded buildings on Alaska Avenue. He must have washed in there when the wave took him.”
Gwen sat in sorrow, imagining what Valerie must have suffered when she had learned the truth—the horrendous, devastating news that no mother ever wants to hear.
“Did she at least get to see him?” Gwen asked. “Did she get to hold him again to say goodbye?”
“Yes, she did.”
Gwen felt the agony of her own loss two years ago, when she’d sat in the hospital bed and sobbed over Lily, wrapped in a small blanket in her arms. It was the worst moment of her life. A nightmare that wouldn’t end. The best she could do was put the agony into a drawerand close it for a while. Lock it away until she was prepared to feel it again. To remember Lily. To accept that she was gone but to remember the love—the love that would always be there.
Peter reached for Gwen’s hand and held it. She couldn’t speak for fear of weeping. They all sat in silence, acknowledging the tragedy.
“How devastating for Valerie,” she finally said when she was able to form words. “I know what it’s like to lose a child.”
Jane regarded her with sympathy. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Gwen didn’t want to go into the details of her own loss, so she steered the conversation back to Valerie. “That’s not what I imagined happened to her and her baby.”
“What did you imagine?” Jeremy asked.
“That she’d put him up for adoption, like her father wanted. I thought maybe her child was out there in the world somewhere, still alive. I wanted to find him. I guess ... in a way, I wanted a happy ending out of this. To learn that the baby survived and that I had a cousin.” Her voice broke, but she pulled herself together and took a breath.
