The girl swallowed and took a step closer, as though she understood the danger of what she was saying and chose to speak anyway.
“They are alive,” she said. “They live where I live, at a place people do not like to look at.”
Meredith straightened so fast she nearly stumbled.
“How could you possibly know that,” she demanded, her voice trembling on the edge of hope and fury.
The girl hesitated, then answered in a whisper that carried farther than she seemed to intend.
“I saw the bands on their wrists. The ones with their names.”
Something shifted violently inside Evan, as if the ground beneath him had cracked without warning.
Three months earlier, a doctor he had never seen before had delivered the news in a quiet room filled with humming machines and blinking lights. Two healthy boys, gone within a weekend, the cause unclear but declared final. The paperwork had been rushed, the cremation discouraged for reasons that were never explained, and Evan had hated himself for signing anything at all. Meredith had barely survived those days, and he had told himself that pressing further would only break her.
Now a barefoot child was standing in a cemetery, unraveling everything they believed with frightening ease.
“My name is Maren,” the girl said when Evan knelt to meet her eye level. “I help take care of them. They were very scared when they came.”
Meredith covered her mouth, tears spilling over despite her effort to hold them back.
“Who brought them there,” Evan asked, his pulse roaring in his ears.
Maren glanced toward the trees, lowering her voice.
“A woman who smells like flowers and money,” she said. “She cries sometimes, but her crying feels sharp, like she is afraid of being caught.”
Evan went cold.
He knew exactly who that description fit.
His former partner, Vivian Cole, had never forgiven him for leaving, never accepted losing control over anything that bore his name. The custody battles had been vicious before the twins were even born, and the restraining orders had come only after things turned dangerous. He had thought those chapters were closed.
He stood, his jaw set.
“Show us,” he said. “Please.”
