I laughed ruefully. “Good to know I look exactly like I feel.”
“Bad?”
Right to the point—my father was good at cutting through the shit. I gave him a one-shouldered shrug. “We learned a lot, but now we have more questions. It seems like the way it always goes.”
“Is Maddy okay?” Dad asked, glancing up at the house.
“She’s taking a nap. It was an intense trip. She needs time to decompress. I’ll tell you everything once the guys get here.”
“Let me help with that.” Dad grabbed the other suitcase and followed me inside.
Ten minutes later, we were sitting around the coffee table in my living room. My phone was on the table, and Luis was on speaker. He was still doing research in Tampa. Having them all there as backup made me feel better.
“Okay, give us the dirt,” Sebastian said.
“Yeah, the build-up is killing me,” Luis said, his voice electronically hollow coming from the phone. “What did you find at that house?”
“Maddy’s parents’ house?” Dad asked.
“No, the other one,” Luis said. “The address I found for you.”
“Hang on,” I said. “We’ll get to that. The trip was definitely worth it. We found a lot.”
Dad sat forward. “Maddy’s birth mother?”
I nodded. “We went to her adoptive parents’ house first. The living room had been ransacked when her parents were taken. It was not a good scene—that’s all I’ll say about that.
“Maddy and I searched the place top to bottom and found some letters her birth mother had sent her. These letters went all the way up until she was eleven years old.”
“So the whole ‘your mother died right after she gave you up’ was another fucking lie Kenneth told us?” Luis asked.
“Basically, yeah. Pretty sure he helped her disappear, and even at the end, he held that information close. He may not have been loyal to us, but he was goddamned loyal to Gabriella. Took her secret to the grave. Anyway, in the very last letter, she signed her initials. M and S. I found a bunch of old prescription scripts for the suppressant pills Maddy’s adoptive parents had given her. Same exact initials.”
“Hang on.” Sebastian sat forward, looking beyond confused. “The doctor’s initials, you mean?”
I nodded at him grimly. “Yup.”
“Maybe I’m not following,” Sebastian said, glancing between the two of us. “Did this doctor and the mother have the same initials?”
“They are one and the same. Right?” Dad asked.
“Exactly,” I said. “Apparently, Kenneth helped Maddy’s birth mother get a whole new identity: plastic surgery, new name, school records—the whole nine yards. She was Maddy’s pediatrician from the time she was three or four years old, maybe earlier.”
“What the fuck?” Sebastian flopped back onto the couch with both hands on his head. “She was right there the whole time?”
“Right,” I went on. “So, she spent years watching her during check-ups and stuff and provided her parents with the drugs to keep her wolf suppressed. Once we had that, it was easy to find her alias. Malia Stanford, MD. Luis did a search andgot us her address. We went straight there the next day—the place hasn't been lived in for years. Looked like she’d run last minute. There was a whole shrine to Maddy. Pictures that either she or Kenneth had taken through her whole life. Kindergarten, preschool, college, and everything in between.”
“Creepy,” Sebastian said.
“Not creepy,” Dad said, giving Sebastian a withering look. “The woman gave away a baby she desperately wanted to keep. It had to be heartbreaking to give away your child to keep her safe. I couldn’t imagine living my whole life without my boys. The heartache? The sadness? A few pictures here and there were probably all that kept her from a depression so deep it could have led to madness or even suicide. Never underappreciate the power of the love of a mother for her child.”
“Sorry,” Sebastian murmured, his cheeks going red.
“The house?” Luis said, nudging the conversation back to my story.
“Yeah, we went inside to find the pictures and a filing cabinet. It was full of children’s medical charts. Maddy’s birth mother had been testing all kinds of kids. DNA tests. From what we saw, she was trying to cross-reference a single genetic marker in Maddy’s DNA with dozens of other kids. No idea why that marker is significant though. It has to have something to do with Edemas’s bloodline. Nothing else in the house, but then someone snuck in while we were there, moved a painting off the wall, and opened a hidden wall safe.”
“While you were inside the house?” Luis asked, amazed by the audacity.
