I nod.
She moves farther down the wall, stopping at 1987. Another birth certificate. This time of Emily Beckett.
She looks back at me, her face tightening.
“What the fuck?” The words leave me before I realize I’ve spoken. I step closer to the wall.
Next to Emily’s certificate is a photograph. A woman I recognize instantly. The woman who dragged me from the fire.
“Maria Blake,” I say.
“How is that possible?” Mara asks. Her eyes flick to me, then she steps back and crouches, following the Polaroids with her fingers. Faces blur together until she stops.
The woman in the photo looks like Emily.
“She was reported missing in 1978,” Mara says. “They never found her body. She was presumed dead in 1980, when the Ozark Butcher was arrested.”
“She was one of the nurses who raised me in the lab,” I say. “The one who pulled me out of the fire.”
Mara taps a sheet of paper beneath the photograph, then tears it free from the wall.
She lifts it, scanning fast. “I guess Rourke solved that one for us, too,” she says. “She’s Emily’s grandmother.”
She laughs softly and grabs another photograph. “Also, Ezra’s wife.”
She steps closer and stands beside me now. “Rourke connected everything,” she says. “He actually did it.” She lets out a quiet chuckle.
“Yes,” I say. “He did.”
She sees it now—all of it.
I raise the gun, centering it between her brows.
Before she can speak, I pull the trigger.
And just like that...bang.
The bullet tears through her skull. Blood bursts across my face and splashes the wall behind her, soaking into photographs and case files. She drops to the floor, her body hitting hard. The sound of her fall began echoing in my ears after the shot.
I stare at the wall of missing women.
I will add one more.
Mara Collins.
I close my eyes. Rourke’s words blinking behind my eyelids, turning into numbers, into patterns, into code that gave me answers.
Mara is the last person who knew about Zeke and me—the last person who knew about Project Gemini.
Maria Blake died long ago. Before she did, she told me how my father tried again in 1987. This time, he took cells from another patient in the program. The same patient carried the pregnancy herself, and the same patient killed herself the moment she gave birth.
It was Maria’s daughter.
Ezra Zane was never the father. Alistair was.
Maria took the child and handed her to a cop she trusted. He helped her erase the paper trail and fake her death. Emily was never the daughter of the man who hurt her. That lie died with him.
Maria told me the experiment worked that time.
