“Your mom doesn’t fully understand how much danger the two of you are in right now, and it’s far better for her if she doesn’t. You’re a smart kid, and youneedto know this.”
“Why don’t you want to change her name, too?”
“Because she’s got a green card, and it’s twenty kinds of complicated. Besides, it’s not your mom they’ll be after.Picka new last name.”
I remember sitting back and struggling to process what she’d just told me. My gaze fell on a poster on the wall, advertising a summer fair they were going to have in a few weeks. St. Howard’s Catholic Church.
“Howard,” I numbly said, meeting her gaze.
She nodded and tapped something into her computer. “We’ll drop your middle name, Terrance, and make it Ronald. That way, if there are any problems with the school records at some point, hopefully that’ll be enough to smooth it over.”
“Won’t someone be able to find me, though? Through my mom’s name on the papers?”
“No. The name change will be sealed by the judge. I’ll have them amend your mom’s name on the new birth certificate. Drop the Renata and Gutierrez, so she’s listed as Elena Espinoza. You’ll get a new birth certificate, new social security number—everything. Then we’ll get you enrolled in school here in Nashville. Declan Terrance Ronald will cease to exist. Hopefully, it’ll be enough. It’s the best I can do, for now.”
I struggled to process all of this. “You’ll enroll me in public school?”
“Yeah. But I need your help with something.”
“What?”
“I need your mom to sign a power of attorney for me to handle things for her. I don’t want to upset her any more than she already is, and we need to do this fast and quietly. The less information she knows, the better off she’ll be. I need you to tell her to sign it. Say it’s paperwork I need to represent her, and to help make the arrangements for Emma, which isn’t a lie.”
She laid the papers in front of me and I glanced through them. It basically gave Ms. Blaine the power to file papers for Mom, and—
“This says it gives you custody of me.”
She nodded. “If necessary.”
I glared at her. “I’mnotletting you take me away from my mom.”
She glanced at the door again, then grabbed her cell phone and called something up. She turned it so I could read the screen. It was a news article, with a picture of a man I vaguely recognized, albeit he looked far older than I remembered him.
The headline was what caught my attention, and it was dated just over two weeks ago.
Family Tells Judge in Lawsuit That Cattle Baron Terrance Ronald Near Death
Reading through it, it heavily quoted the man’s son, Terrance Ronald, Jr.
My much older half-brother, who I never knew existed.
Apparently, there’d been an ongoing, bitter lawsuit between the Ronald family and other family members over property rights. From what I could gather, the Ronald family was very, very wealthy, and this case involved hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of land.
As I met her gaze again, it immediately clicked in my head what she was saying. I felt the need to whisper as rage filled me. “You think they had my sister murdered?”
“I’m saying it’s awfully suspicious that when I contacted the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office this morning to find out what progress had been made in the case, a detective implied that it’d behoove me to accept the official findings due out next week, and to convince you and your mom to accept them, too.”
Cold rage gelled in my stomach. “They haven’t arrested anyone for it yet!”
“Oh, but they did. They picked up a guy living nearby, who was on probation for child molestation. He ‘confessed’ to the crime and he was going to be formally charged for it and arraigned.”
“Was?”
“He mysteriously committed suicide in custody the day before yesterday. Suicide note and everything. They’ve closed the case already.”
It felt like I’d been punched in the gut. “And you don’t think he did it?”
She grimly smiled. “I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa, either. You look a little old to believe in them yourself.”
