Neither of them answered fast enough.
I closed my eyes. “I hate when you both go quiet at the same time.”
“His heart is failing,” my mother whispered. “The doctors are buying us time, not certainty.”
Silence filled the room.
My father reached into his jacket and handed me a folded sheet of paper. An address. Ash Hollow, Missouri.
“I’m not asking you to obey me blindly,” he said. “I’m asking you to investigate before you judge.”
I looked from the paper to the oxygen line under his nose.
“Do you even know what she looks like now?”
“No,” he said. “But I know what her father was. And men like that don’t raise cruelty.”
I almost told him that goodness wasn’t hereditary, adopted or otherwise.
Instead, I took the address.
And a week later I rented a battered pickup under a fake name, left my watch in a hotel safe, pulled on jeans, boots, and a dust-stained work shirt, and headed south as Gregory Hale disappeared behind the windshield.
The next day, I returned to the Carter house looking rougher than I’d ever looked in my life.
I’d traded the pickup for a used motorcycle and spent the morning on a brick crew in a nearby town, enough to cover myself in mortar dust and sweat. If anyone asked, I was Greg Hill, a day laborer and brick mason drifting through the county for work.
When I knocked on the Carter gate that afternoon, the woman from the porch appeared again.
Elizabeth Carter.
Up close, she looked like the kind of woman who worked hard to seem wealthier than she was. Hair blown out. Cheap gold jewelry. Carefully applied lipstick at two in the afternoon. Behind her stood her daughters, Chloe and Madison—both dressed like social media had promised them a richer life than common sense ever would.
“Can I help you?” Elizabeth asked, her tone already annoyed.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, lowering my eyes just enough. “I got jumped outside town. They took my cash and bag. I haven’t eaten since yesterday. I was hoping I could work for a meal.”
Chloe snorted. Madison folded her arms.
Elizabeth looked me up and down like she was deciding whether I was pathetic enough to be entertaining.
“This house look like a soup kitchen to you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then why are you here?”
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