If the woman in the picture was my real mother, and she was dead…
“Who is the woman you live with, Clara?” Thomas asked, his voice suddenly dropping to a deadly, terrifying calm.
A cold wave of horror washed over me, chilling me down to my very bones.
I looked up from the photograph, my eyes wide with sheer panic.
The woman I called my mother. The woman who had told me to hide in the car. The woman who suddenly appeared in my life right after the accident.
“I don’t know,” I whispered, the terrifying reality finally crashing down on me. “I don’t know who she is.”
Reverend Thomas didn’t hesitate. He spun around, facing the large man standing by the door.
“Get a team to her address right now,” Thomas roared, his voice echoing violently across the cafeteria. “Do not let that woman leave the city. Bring her to me alive.”
CHAPTER 4
The radio strapped to the lead security guard’s chest crackled.
He pressed a hand to his earpiece, his eyes locked on Reverend Thomas. He nodded once, a sharp, clinical movement.
“Sir,” the guard said, his voice cutting through the deafening silence of the cafeteria. “Team Alpha is three minutes away from the address. Local police have been notified and are establishing a perimeter. She has nowhere to go.”
Reverend Thomas slowly lowered his head. He took a deep, shuddering breath, resting both hands heavily on the polished silver handle of his cane.
I collapsed onto a hard plastic cafeteria chair. My legs simply refused to hold my weight anymore.
The dried tomato soup was still plastered to my skin, stiffening the fabric of my ruined white dress, but I couldn’t feel the cold. I couldn’t feel anything at all. I was entirely numb.
Fourteen years.
For fourteen years, I had believed I was a burden. I had believed my mother worked her fingers to the bone cleaning rich people’s toilets just to keep a roof over our heads. I had felt guilty every time I asked for a new pair of shoes or a couple of dollars for a school field trip.
And it was all a lie.
The woman who braided my hair, who kissed my forehead when I had a fever, who told me to keep my head down and never draw attention to myself… she was hiding me.
She wasn’t protecting me from poverty. She was protecting herself from prison.
Suddenly, a thousand tiny, insignificant memories from my childhood came crashing back into my mind, slotting together like pieces of a horrifying puzzle.
I remembered how we moved out of state three different times before I turned ten.
I remembered how she panicked whenever a police cruiser drove past our apartment building, forcefully pulling the cheap plastic blinds shut.
I remembered how she strictly forbade me from ever getting a state ID, terrified of putting my fingerprints or photograph into any government database. She had claimed it was because we owed the government money.
It wasn’t debt. It was kidnapping.
“Clara.”
Reverend Thomas’s voice broke through the rushing sound in my ears.
He pulled up a chair and sat down right across from me. This towering, intimidating billionaire, a man who had governors and senators on speed dial, was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at me like I was the only person left in the universe.
“I know this is terrifying,” he said softly, his icy blue eyes completely melted into pools of profound sorrow. “I know your entire world has just been shattered. But I need you to know something right now.”
He reached out and gently laid his large, weathered hand over my trembling fingers.
“You are never going back to that apartment,” he whispered fiercely. “You are never riding a city bus at dawn again. You are never going to be cold, or hungry, or afraid. You are a Thomas. And you are finally coming home.”
Tears spilled over my eyelashes, cutting hot, wet tracks down my cheeks.
I wanted to speak, to ask him about my real parents, about the crash, about the fourteen years of birthdays and Christmases we had lost. But the heavy, suffocating lump in my throat made it impossible to breathe.
Suddenly, the security guard’s radio buzzed again.
This time, the voice on the other end was loud enough for the entire room to hear.
“Target secured, Boss,” the voice crackled through the static. “We intercepted her in the alleyway behind the complex. She had a duffel bag packed with cash and two burner phones. She was trying to run.”
Reverend Thomas didn’t blink. His jaw tightened, a muscle feathering dangerously in his cheek.
“Did you find anything else?” he asked the guard.
The guard pressed his radio button. “Alpha Team, report.”
“We breached the apartment,” the radio responded. “Found a loose floorboard in the bedroom closet. Inside is a metal lockbox. Sir… it’s all here. The original birth certificate for Clara Thomas. News clippings of the bridge accident. And a journal detailing the movements of the suspect.”
A collective gasp echoed through the cafeteria.
It was over. There was no more doubt. No more confusion. The absolute, undeniable proof had just been pulled from the dirty floorboards of my fake life.