I just know I can’t shoot him.
Noah puts his hand over the barrel of my gun—his Glock—and pushes it down.
He puts his forehead against mine.
“It’s okay now,” he says. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Tell me it wasn’t you,” I whisper. “Tell me you aren’t his son.”
Noah removes the gun from my hand. He replaces it with the scroll of papers, pressing them firmly into my palm.
His mouth moves to my ear.
“Holden didn’t have a son,” he says. “He had a daughter.”
121
“HERE. IT SUCKS, but it’s hot.”
Officer Lauren Ricketts places the Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of me in the interview room at the substation. When I look up to thank her, I see black spots, and I feel the weight under my eyes.
“Rough night,” she says, rubbing my back. “Tomorrow will be better.”
Tomorrow is today. It’s past five in the morning.
And no amount of tomorrows will change it.
I look down again at the documents, still curved along the edges from having been rolled up in Noah’s pocket for several hours. I read through them again, for at least the twentieth time.
The first page, a piece of stationery bearing the name Lincoln Investigative Services. A letter to Holden Dahlquist VI.
You asked us to determine whether a woman named Gloria Willis, of Bridgehampton, mother of Aiden Willis, gave birth to a second child approximately eight years ago.
Holden knew, or at least suspected, that he’d impregnated Aiden’s mother.
The answer to your question is yes. Eight years ago, Ms. Willis did give birth to a second child at Southampton Hospital but left the hospital with her child only hours later, without filling out any paperwork. We believe that she abandoned this child later that evening at the Bridgehampton Police Substation (see attached news headline).
I flip the page. The news clipping I saw myself, at Aiden’s house:
Newborn Abandoned at Police Station
The photo of Uncle Lang, holding the baby at the substation in Bridgehampton.
The next page, a photocopy of a handwritten note, the penmanship poor but legible:
Please find my daughter a good home. She is in danger. Don’t ever let her know about me. Don’t ever let her try to find me or the father. He will kill her.
My pulse banging like a gong, no matter how many times I read this note, a note from a terrified mother trying to protect her newborn daughter the only way she knew how—by abandoning her.
I flip to the next page, a court document:
At a Term of the Family Court of the State of New York,
held in and for the County of Suffolk, at Riverhead,
New York
In the Matter of the Adoption of a Child
Known as Baby Girl X
I skip a bunch of the middle pages because they are legalese, just a bunch of lawyers’ words. The punch line at the final page:
IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the petition of Gary and Lydia Murphy, for the adoption of Baby Girl X, a person born on a date unknown, at a location unknown, is allowed and approved; and it is further
ORDERED that the name of the adoptive child shall be JENNA ROSE MURPHY, and that the adoptive child shall hereafter be known by that name.
I can picture her. Of course I can’t in reality, but my brain isn’t tracking reality now—I can picture my mother, visiting Uncle Lang like they did every summer, taking me from Lang, holding me in her arms and saying, I’ll love her. I’ll love this child.
A single tear, falling onto the page, a thick circular stain in the corner.
Still unable to believe it, though it makes all the sense in the world.
My physical differences from my parents and brother, especially the red hair. My nickname, the red sheep of the family.
Never quite feeling like I fit in.
Sometimes we tell our children little white lies, Chloe said to me.
She didn’t tell me—none of them told me, not Mom, not Dad, not Lang, not Chloe. They kept me in the dark to protect me. Protect me from whom, they didn’t know.
A little white lie.
And here I thought it was random—I thought I was a random victim at that house that day. When in reality, Holden was trying to kill me to end the Dahlquist bloodline. First he ran down Aiden’s mother—my mother—with a car, then he had Justin scoop me up and bring me to the house to finish the job.
I would’ve died in that house if it weren’t for Aiden, coming to avenge his mother’s death.
Chief Isaac Marks pops his head in the door, measuring the look on my face before deeming it safe to enter.
“Murphy,” he says. “We’re done with Noah’s interview. So you two are free to leave.”
I nod and push myself out of the chair, my legs uncertain.
“Murphy, I—I’m sorry,” he says. “I was a jerk. And I had you all wrong. I thought you were a loose cannon hassling poor Aiden for no reason. And then I—well, I admit for a time there, I—”
“You thought I was a serial killer.”