Page 20 of Weight of Guilt

“An FBI agent. His name was Donnelly. Jeff Donnelly, I think. He gave it a valiant effort, but he got nowhere.”

“Is he still active?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t heard from him in years.” She hesitated. “I don’t know that my sisters and I want to go to law enforcement yet.”

“Can I push back on that for a second?”

Wren’s eyes came up to his. “Okay.”

“If this teenager isn’t your brother,” Nash said carefully, “then you’ve got a stranger sleeping in your childhood home tonight, and none of you know why he’s really there. If it is your brother, whoever held him for ten years is still out there somewhere, and that’s not a small thing to quietly sit on. Either way, I’d think hard about how long you wait.”

“I know.” She wrapped both hands around her glass. “Believe me, I know. But if we call this in, and it turns out to be nothing . . . my mom. I don’t know how she’ll handle it. She’s barely held together for ten years as it is. I don’t think she’d survive getting her hope handed back to her and then taken away again in the same week.”

“And if it’s real and you waited too long to report it?”

“Then I’ll have to live with that too.” Her voice caught. “I don’t have a version of tonight where I get to make the right call for certain. I just have to pick which risk I can survive being wrong about.”

Nash didn’t have an answer for that, and he didn’t try to manufacture one.

“Christian doesn’t want us to go to the police either,” Wren added, her voice dropping lower. “He’s scared of what will happen once it’s not just us anymore. Police. Reporters. Questions he can’t answer. I’d override his fear in a heartbeat if I thought it kept anyone safer. I’m not sure yet that it would.”

Nash shifted, some of his tension easing, though not all of it. “Then here’s what you should to do in the meantime. Don’t let Christian know you’re suspicious. Not yet. Not directly. The second he thinks you doubt him, he’ll either shut down completely or start telling you what he thinks you want to hear. Either way, you lose information.”

Wren didn’t say anything, but her posture relaxed almost as if she’d been braced for him to tell her she was overreacting, and he hadn’t.

“Second.” Nash leaned forward. “Document everything now, while it’s fresh. Every detail he gives you, write it down exactly how he says it. Memory shifts fast, especially traumatic memory. Inconsistencies that show up later are only useful if you’ve got something solid to compare them against.”

“Okay.” She nodded.

“Third.” He hesitated—not because the idea itself was complicated, but because he already knew how it would sound. “You need a DNA test.”

“That’s what I thought too.”

“A scar and one childhood memory isn’t definitive proof of anything.” He kept his voice even and deliberately gentle. “I’ve seen people build entire false identities on details like that. I’m not saying that’s what this is. But you deserve to actually know, instead of just hoping hard enough that everything about this situation turns out to be true.”

Wren stared at her glass of water as if it might answer for her.

“And if the test comes back and it’s really him?” Her voice almost sounded childlike. “If that’s the case, then I’ve treated my own brother like a suspect. How can I live with myself knowing that?”

“You can’t think like that. You need real proof instead of a gut feeling. Once you know, you’ll never have to wonder again.”

Wren didn’t have a response for Nash, at least not one she trusted enough to say out loud. Instead, she finished her water and stood before the silence could stretch any further.

“Thank you.” She stepped toward the door and paused. “I just didn’t know who to talk to or what to do.”

“You came to the right place.” Nash walked her to the door, Tank trailing after them both, his nails clicking against the hardwood. “You’re asking the right questions.”

“I appreciate that.”

He leaned a shoulder against the doorframe as she stepped out. “Call if you need me.”

“I don’t have your number.”

“I can remedy that.”

She pulled out her phone, and he recited his number.

“Got it. Thanks.” She managed a smile.