I looked toward the motel rooms, suddenly aware of every shadow.
“Are you safe here?”
“For tonight.”
“For tonight isn’t enough.”
“It has been enough for a year.”
The rebuke was quiet, and it found its mark.
I took a slow breath. “I won’t ask you to trust me. But let me help find Lily.”
“No.”
“Megan—”
“No,” she repeated, stronger. “You want to help because guilt just found you. I have lived with this every day. I have followed every thread, every record, every rumor. I have knocked on doors you wouldn’t know existed. I have sat across from people who smiled and lied because someone with money had reached them first.”
“Then use my money.”
Her eyes flashed. “Your money helped bury her.”
I flinched.
A door opened behind her. An older man stepped out from the motel office holding a towel, his gaze moving between us. He did not interrupt, but he did not go back inside either.
Megan noticed him and seemed to draw strength from his presence.
I lowered my voice. “I found the payments to Gregory. I have copies of records. I can get lawyers involved quietly. Not company counsel. Independent. I can hire investigators who weren’t part of this.”
“And when your mother finds out?”
“She won’t.”
Megan gave me a look that almost resembled the woman I had once known—the one who could hear weakness in a contract clause from across a table.
“Rowan,” she said, “your mother always finds out.”
I wanted to deny it. Instead, I remembered being ten years old, hiding a cracked vase behind the curtains, only for Evelyn Bellamy to find it before dinner and ask me whether lying felt more comfortable than courage.
She had trained me to fear disappointment before truth.
Maybe that was why Claire had fooled me so easily. She had not needed to create a weakness. She had only needed to find the ones my family had polished into virtues.
“Then I’ll make sure she finds out too late,” I said.
Megan studied me for a long moment. “You sound like him.”
“Who?”
“Your father.”
The words startled me.
My father had died six years earlier, and in my family, his name was spoken with careful admiration, like a portrait that must never be tilted. Henry Bellamy had been warm where my mother was composed, patient where she was exacting. He had loved Megan from the first Thanksgiving she spent with us because, as he told me later, “That girl looks at you like she sees the person under the suit.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She hesitated. “After your father died, I found something in his study. A letter addressed to you. I never opened it. Your mother took it before I could mention it.”
I frowned. “What letter?”
“I don’t know. But she was frightened when she saw it.”
My mother frightened was not an image I could easily imagine.
A soft cry broke the moment. Ellis had woken in the carrier, his tiny face scrunching with displeasure. Megan knelt, unfastened the straps, and lifted him with practiced care. Now both babies rested against her, small and warm and alive.
My sons.
I wanted to reach for them with a pain so physical it felt like thirst.
But I did not.
“May I see them?” I asked.
Megan’s arms tightened.
“Not hold them,” I said quickly. “Just see.”
Her eyes searched mine, perhaps looking for the old Rowan—the one who assumed permission came with wanting. After a moment, she turned slightly so the porch light fell across Ellis’s face.
He was astonishing.
Not because he looked like me, though he did. The blond hair. The shape of the brow. The small crease between his eyebrows as though he disapproved of the temperature.
He was astonishing because he was here, breathing, blinking sleepily against his mother’s shoulder while I stood before him as both stranger and father.
Noah slept through everything, one fist curled beneath his chin.
“They’re beautiful,” I whispered.
Megan’s expression softened despite herself. “They’re loud.”
I laughed once, but it broke apart in my chest.
“I missed everything.”
“Yes.”
Their first breaths. First cries. First nights. The fear. The hospital. The tiny fingers. The paperwork. The naming. The learning of them.
I had missed it because I had believed a lie that flattered my wounded pride.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Megan looked tired suddenly. So tired the anger could not hold her upright by itself.
“I know you are,” she said. “That’s the worst part.”
“What is?”
“That I still know when you mean something.”
The space between us filled with all the years before the ruin. The kitchen mornings. The rainy-day drives. The arguments that ended with apologies and cold pizza. The way she used to fall asleep reading with her thumb marking the page. The way I used to believe there were some things no one could take from us.
Then Claire’s name appeared on my phone again, lighting the darkness from inside my pocket.
Megan saw it.
“Go home, Rowan.”
