The world stopped.
Dead.
Eleanor was… dead.
“That… that can’t be right,” I stammered. She is young. She is my age. “The detective must be mistaken.”
“There’s no mistake. There’s a reason we couldn’t find her. She didn’t have health insurance, so she entered a marriage of convenience with a friend to get the treatment she needed. She changed her last name. We only found her through her mother’s name on the death certificate.”
“When?” I managed to ask. “When did it happen?”
“The date of death was two weeks ago. She’d been in treatment for almost a year, but she was admitted the day after the girls showed up at your hotel.”
“The girls said a man took them there.”
“He did. Her husband, George Jones. He’s missing now. Insurance fraud is a serious crime, and he’s been caught.” She let out a heavy sigh. “That’s it, Logan. The search is over.”
“Thank you, Janet.”
“You’re welcome. And… I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.”
I ended the call and stood motionless in the hallway, the silence pressing in on me. The joy I’d felt just minutes ago now felt like a distant memory.
My God… How am I ever going to tell the girls?
Evelyn stepped back into the hallway, her smile fading the instant she saw my face.
“Logan?” Her voice was laced with alarm. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
I could only nod, words failing me. I reached for her, pulling her into a tight embrace, burying my face in her hair.
And she held me, her steady presence a small, comforting anchor in the sudden, devastating storm.
Chapter Thirty-Five
LOGAN
I barely slept that night. Most of it was spent talking with Evelyn, circling the same devastating discovery and the same impossible question: how would we tell the girls?
Death is difficult enough for an adult to process. For a child, it’s a labyrinth of confusion and fear. When we took them to Bonnie’s funeral, their questions were endless, and we’d answered them as gently as we could. But that was different. They had never even met their Aunt Bonnie.
This was their mother.
In the end, Evelyn and I decided we would sit down with them the following evening, just the two of us, after I got home from the hospital.
Now, late in the afternoon, I was trapped in my office, staring at a mountain of administrative paperwork. My concentration was shattered; my mind kept circling back to the lawyer’s call.
Realizing I was getting nowhere, I decided to step out for a coffee. I had an espresso machine in my office, but I hoped the walk to the cafeteria would clear my head enough to focus when I returned.
I had barely stepped into the hallway when I heard the sound of a scuffle.
“This is a restricted area for staff only,” a security guard said firmly. “You can’t be here.”
“I have to!” a man’s voice pleaded, frantic. “I need to see Dr. Turner. It’s urgent!”
Hearing my name, I turned toward the commotion. A small group—two security guards and three nurses—were trying to restrain a single, distraught man.
