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8
Gabe
“We’ll get to the bottom of it,” I told Bella on the drive home. “Gather everything you have—birth certificate, childhood photos, anything from the time you grew up.”
With my background and history, I could find almost anyone. Bella was a journalist, so I knew she had the tools to dig up info as well. Together, there was no way we wouldn’t get to the bottom of things.
“My head is spinning,” she said. “I always suspected something was off, but I thought it was typical teenage angst of hoping I had different parents all along, you know?”
I nodded. “I think that’s normal.”
“But I have flashes of memories in my head, of people I never saw again. Maybe they were distant relatives or maybe I dreamed them up. Who knows, but now I wonder if maybe—”
She trailed off, but I knew what she was thinking. Those people she had memory flashes of, maybe they were her real family.
Her mother didn’t give her much to work with, but she had mentioned that she’d done something bad which led us both to believe that the method they used for Bella joining the family was most likely illegal.
Bella was definitely right about her parents not likely being parental candidates to adopt. Criminal history. Alcohol and drug abuse. Domestic violence charges. I’d heard about it over the years, and I knew what kind of people her parents were. Her dad was in prison and likely would be for a long time for multiple charges.
Normally I wouldn’t jump to kidnapping as the first viable option, but in her case, it seemed the most likely.
When we got home, Bella and I went to her room, and we grabbed everything she had from her birth and childhood. With those documents and photos in hand, we went into the library.
I brought my laptop so she could relax on the comfortable couch while I worked on doing do everything in my power to get her the answers she desperately needed.
First, she handed me her birth certificate.
Isabella Marie Stone born to James and Mary Stone of St. Louis, Missouri, on October 15, Barnes Hospital. Nothing unusual there, at least at first glance, but her dad had gone to prison for forging legal documents, so I knew that I would have to dig deeper if I wanted to prove it was a fake.
Bella had no baby photos, none whatsoever. The earliest photo she had of herself was at the age of about three or four. She told me that her parents claimed they had none, and when pressed, she said they talked about a fire and losing everything in it when she was young, but she couldn’t remember anything about a fire happening. They insisted she was too young and had forgotten.
“You were a cute kid,” I said, staring down at the photo of a toddler Bella in pigtails. Her hair was just as strawberry blonde then as it was as an adult, but curlier. She had a big, bright smile and was wearing a pink dress with little white bows all over it, and pink bows in her hair. I wondered, if one of the babies was a girl, would they look like her? Because if so, that would be so damned adorable.
“Thanks, I only wish I knew what I looked like as a baby,” she muttered.
“I promise you, I will find out what happened.”
She smiled at me, and my insides turned to mush. Over the last few weeks, I had spent a lot of time with Bella. We had kept our promise to Ava and had not been intimate again. It would have been hard with how pregnant she was anyway, though I couldn’t deny being tempted. I found myself looking for excuses just to be in the same room as her but told myself it wasn’t because I had feelings for her, it was wanting to protect my babies. But even I knew that was a bunch of bullshit.
First thing I did was scan the photo and do an image search to see if anything popped up. I wasn’t expecting much, but it was a logical first step. As the results populated my screen, however, my chest grew tight.
My face must have given away my thoughts because Bella was looking over at the screen. “What is it?”
I clicked the result that caught my eye.
It was a missing child poster that had been circulated in Chicago and online.
“That looks like me! That’s even the same dress from the photo!” she exclaimed.
She was right. The photo was almost exactly the same. Subtle differences in posing, but I was still looking at an adorable redheaded toddler in a pink dress with little white bows who was three years old when she went missing from her family’s home. She was never found.
“Her name is Anabel,” I said. “Anabel O’Connell.”
“Anabel…” Bella whispered to herself. “Is my name really Anabel?”
I shrugged, because truthfully, I didn’t have the answers. Could it just be a similar looking little girl? Or was it Bella?
“Does it say who to contact?” She leaned closer to read the information on the poster.
