The quiet that came was answer enough. Audrey barked an ugly laugh. “Unbelievable.”
“You were unstable,” he snapped. Finally, he looked at her. “You were isolated. Doped. Under surveillance. One wrong movemight have cost you your hearing. I was not going to put ‘your mother may be alive and operating under false identities throughout multiple countries’ into the head of a woman the court already thought was delusional.”
“Then maybe you should have met me at the prison gates as you promised.”
His face changed then. She tried to read him, but his emotions cycled too quickly for her to get a clear answer. At first, she thought it was guilt, but a trace of pain that hit close enough to wound, and sympathy almost surfaced in her anger.
“I tried.”
“No, Alex. You didn’t.” Tears burned in her eyes. “Trying means showing up.”
She looked at the papers, forcing herself to breathe. A date on a manifest grabbed her attention. It was from her last hearing.
Her heart sank. “She left before I got out,” Audrey whispered.
“Yes.”
“She knew.”
“Yes.”
“She knew I was walking.”
“Yes.”
Every answer from him landed like another nail sealing her coffin shut. She paused her questioning to give him a chance to start talking, start explaining himself.
But he didn’t.
Audrey crossed to him before she could think better of it and ripped the rest of the file from his hand. Pages spilled over the counter. Photographs skidded across the granite surface. She grabbed the nearest one and held it up between them.
“Say it,” she demanded. “Say that this is her.”
Alex glanced quickly at the image. “It’s her.”
She picked up another photograph. This one had a date stamp and a still frame of Sophia moving through what lookedlike a train platform, head slightly bowed, one man ahead of her, another behind. Escort? Protection? Surveillance? Audrey didn’t know.
“What am I looking at?”
“Movement,” he said.
“We should take this to the police.”
“No. If I hand this to the wrong people, it disappears. Or it gets back to the people protecting her.”
Her eyes lifted slowly from the papers. “How deep does this go?”
Another stretch of silence welcomed her question, and this time, she didn’t hold back. Her hand cracked across his face. The sound bounced off the walls within the quiet apartment.
“How dare you?” Audrey hissed.
Alex shifted his head slowly back toward her. A red mark bloomed along his cheek, but he didn’t raise his voice. In fact, he didn’t react the way most people would. Audrey examined him differently.
Alex had always been calm—too calm. Like he was watching the world instead of living inside it. “I was trying to protect you.”
“By lying?” Her breath came faster. “I rotted for ten years while you played detective.”
“I was trying to get you out,” he said. “I didn’t know everything then. I do now.”
