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Nothing in this storage shed indicated the woman who had owned these things had ever had access to more than half a million dollars from the sales of some of her children.
Something wasn’t adding up.
There had to be some logic behind what Denise had done. Some reason she had traded her own flesh for nickels and dimes. What had she gained from having so many children? Money had been fleeting, and the strain on the body during pregnancy would have been real. So why? Denise hadn’t gotten rich, hadn’t even gotten out of a run-down apartment she could barely afford before her death. They had her bank records to prove it.
So why had she tossed them all away like she had? And…where had the money she’d gotten from Caine, Rafe, and Ariella gone? Caine, Rafe, and Ariella alone had netted her close to four hundred fifty thousand dollars. So where had that money ended up?
Zoey just wanted to knowwhyDenise had done that. Denise had left Luc and Paige for three or four days, and when she’d come back—she’d sold them. He’d been eleven. Old enough to always remember an extremely tall man saying howperfectthey both were that day. For his experiment. Luc had gotten scared, taken his baby sister, and run. Denise had disappeared before the police had made it to her apartment to check out Luc’s story.
Luc and Paige had gone into foster care then.
Paige peeled back the first lid after pulling tape off one end. “I think I have photo albums and a few bank boxes and a handful of notebooks.”
Zoey opened hers. “Same. And more cookbooks and…how-tos. Set the photo albums and the notebooks and the bank boxes aside. I’ll go through them later. Maybe there will be something in them to better identify her.”
Denise had come from somewhere. Zoey just had to find that somewhere now.
3
Everything that might yielda lead had been loaded into the back of her Jeep. There hadn’t been much. Now it sat on the dining room table in the brand-new house far too big for just Zoey and Pen. Zoey ordered dinner—the guards at the gate would deliver it after it arrived, they’d flirt with her a bit, and then the rest of her night was going to be spent…
Digging.
Time to get started.
The first album contained a few halfhearted attempts to chronicle Simon’s life. It ended when Simon was around eight years old. There were a few report cards, with his wrong birthdate listed. A few other mementos that surprised her. Denise hadn't seemed the type to care one bit for what Simon had accomplished in his early childhood.There was nothing really helpful for her, but she’d give what she’d found to Paige.
Simon might want the memories someday. Maybe. He was adamant Paige was his mom and Mick was his dad. He never acknowledged Denise’s part of his life at all.
His hurts still ran deep, too.
There were no signs Denise had been pregnant during those first eight years.No signs of Paige or Luc in those albums either. It was like she’d erased them from her memories once they were gone. Denise had kept Paige, Luc, and Simon—that was it. As far as they knew. But Paige was seventeen years older than Simon. There could have been children in between. Besides Pen, Zoey, and Ariella.
There were very few photos of Denise and Simon together. Zoey had seen a few photos of her mother before. A handful of mug shots—alcohol-related charges—and a few others that had been found in various searches. There was remarkably little online of that woman anywhere. Denise had been around thirty-nine when Simon had been born—they thought. A decade older than Zoey was now.
The woman staring back at her from the photos was definitely older. Aged and rough, though she doubted Denise had quite hit fifty in the photos.
Zoey and Ariella resembled Denise the most, she decided, but Denise looked hard and brittle. Aged and angry. That fit with the mental image Zoey had always had of the woman who had just left her at a hospital and walked away, with a note saying Zoey wasdefectiveand Denise didn't want her back.
A couple had tried to adopt Zoey—the Burkes—when she'd been around two or so, but for some reason they'd changed their minds. They'd been her first foster home, having taken her home from the hospital. They hadn’t wanted her either apparently.
According to her records, a week after the failed adoption, she'd been sent somewhere thirty-five miles away. To an older couple who had taken in foster kids to supplement his pension. She'd stayed there until she was five and the man had died. She'd bounced around after that.
Until she'd ended up with the Hortons. She'd stayed there five years and had been ok with the way things went there. They hadn't been a bad family at all. They’d just had a lot of rules. Very strict ones. She’d learned to follow them quickly.
Then Pen had shown up, just three weeks old and fresh from the hospital, after having had heart surgery. The Hortons had decided the two of them together, especially with Pen's medical needs at the time, were too much responsibility for them, with their four other higher-needs foster kids who had demanded the Hortons’ attention far more.
They hadn’t been bad foster parents, just…they had a specific type of kids they suited best. If they hadn’t had baby Pen, Zoey probably would have stayed there a great deal longer—she hadn’t been a problem child at all. But the Hortons had wanted her and Pen to stay together.
Zoey and Pen had been sent to another home. For four months. But that home couldn't handle a high-needs infant who had cried all the time. Their workers had split them up after that for three months, but Zoey had become such a behavioral problem when she had never been before, freaking out over her baby sister, they'd reunited them.
She'd promised to behave after that. They'd had a few more homes together, then a nasty social worker had split them up when Pen was five. Zoey had aged out of care two years later.
There had been a few notes in her file. Home reports. Her first family had loved her, the Burkes. She had never understood why she'd been taken from them. Her file just said the case worker had requested immediate removal. And that was it.
The safe, loving family where she had been nurtured, loved, and—according to her file—sufficientlyattachedandbonded—was just gone. Forgotten about. Shehatedhow the system did that to kids.
It hadn't changed much since.
