I clutch the desk with both hands, knuckles bone-white.
I scroll farther, looking for anything else. For a while it’s nothing but mergers, acquisitions, dry business reporting. Then the stories get stranger.
After the wedding, there are a few years of public appearances, charity events, tech conferences. There’s a shot of my mother standing next to Harrington at a gala, her hand on his arm, her face a mask of polite emptiness. There’s a caption: “Mr. and Mrs. Harrington, an indomitable team in business and in life.”
It went on to congratulate her on her pregnancy and then announce my birth.
Another news story: “MRS. HARRINGTON DISAPPEARS.” The body of the article is mostly speculation. “A source close to the family says there is no trace, but they will continue searching.”
Then it all goes cold.
I sit back, hitting the couch, the blue light of the screen making my skin look like wax.
I open a new tab and search “Harrington Westpoint legacy.” Instantly, hundreds of hits. I click through to an anonymous message board, the kind that lives and dies by rumor. There are threads about the family, about the weird rules at Westpoint, about the way kids disappear and reappear, about the “Night Hunt” that no one can confirm but everyone knows is real.
One comment sticks out, posted four years ago by an anonymous user: “It’s not the Hunt you should worry about. It’s what happens if you win. The Board doesn’t let anyone out, ever.”
I close the browser. My head is spinning.
My gaze fixates on the wallpaper on my desktop: a grainy photo of me and my mother on a playground, both of us bundled in winter coats. She’s kneeling behind me, her arms wrapped around my chest. I can’t see her face—her hair is blown across it, wild and dark and alive—but I know she was smiling, at least in that moment.
I try to remember the sound of her voice, but all I get is the echo of the Board’s words.
She broke our agreement. Ran, if I recall. But the thing about bloodlines, Miss Allen, is that they never really let you go.
I wonder if she knew they’d come for me.
I wonder if she knew I’d end up here, alone in a tiny room, chasing the truth through lines of code and pixels.
The screen goes to sleep, and I stare at my reflection in the black glass.
I look like my mother. I never noticed it before, but now it’s obvious. The same eyes, the same sharp chin, the same haunted look.
I touch the screen, fingers tracing the outline of her face.
It doesn’t help. But it doesn’t hurt as much as it should.
I wake the computer, and keep searching.
I want every detail. Every secret. Every way out.
I will not let them win.
Not this time.
Hours pass and finally I’m piecing it all together.
I print everything. An insurance policy, if you will.
Every article, every op-ed, every link that mentions Harrington or my mother or the Hunt or the Board. I burn through half a cartridge in an hour, the printer whining, spitting out sheet after sheet until the pile is a foot deep and my fingers are sticky with ink. I make stacks on the floor, the bed, the window ledge. I grab a highlighter and start circling names and dates and phrases thatstand out. I tape the photo of my mother to the desk lamp, so she’s always looking at me.
There’s a pattern, if you squint.
Most of the coverage is sanitized. Kent Harrington the genius. Kent Harrington the disruptor. Kent Harrington the philanthropist. His wives come and go, but there’s never a hint of scandal. When one disappears, there’s a respectful delay before her name is quietly erased. Each replacement is younger, blonder, a better fit for the magazine covers.
There’s almost nothing else about my mom’s ‘disappearance’ except one badly scanned sheet, uploaded to the same back-end internet site that focuses on conspiracies and the like.
There’s a police report, heavily redacted, with the line: “No body recovered. Presumed dead.” I pull up a map of the lake where she supposedly drowned. It’s thirty miles from the house we lived in. We never owned a boat.
