Chapter 9: The Name Behind Everything
Ryan took the phone out of my hand.
He read the message twice.
Then he called Patricia.
"Screenshot it and don't delete it," she said immediately.
"I'm calling Sousa right now.
Do not respond.
Do not touch that thread again."
Ryan set the phone face-up on the table between us.
We both looked at it.
"One daughter left," he said.
"They know about Gabriella."
"They know where we live."
I was already moving toward the stairs.
I went up to Gabriella's room, where she was playing with her blocks on the floor, completely unaware, and I sat in the doorway and watched her for a moment.
She looked up and smiled.
"Mama, look." She held up a tower she'd built.
"Beautiful," I said.
"Can you do me a favor and stay up here for a little while?
I'll bring you a snack."
"Okay," she said, and went back to her blocks.
I went back downstairs.
Ryan was on the phone with Sousa.
I heard him reading the message aloud.
Sousa came to the house within the hour.
He sat at our kitchen table with a recorder and a notepad and the particular stillness of someone who had learned not to react visibly to things that should be reacted to.
"The text came from a burner," he said.
"We'll trace what we can, but I want to talk about who knew you were asking questions." He looked at me.
"Who have you spoken to in the last seventy-two hours?"
"Dennis Hartley.
Carol.
Patricia.
You, through Patricia."
"Anyone else?
Family?
Friends?"
"No."
Sousa wrote something down.
"Gerald is still in interview.
Before his attorney arrived, he gave us one name.
He said he was hired through an intermediary, but the money came from a woman named Diane Calloway."
Ryan's chair scraped back.
"That's my mother," he said.
Sousa looked at him steadily.
"I know."
The silence in that kitchen was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
Ryan stood up.
He walked to the window.
He stood there with his back to us and I could see his shoulders and the way they were held — rigid, like he was using every muscle he had to stay upright.
"Ryan," I said.
He didn't turn around.
"Mr.
Calloway," Sousa said carefully.
"Is there anything you can tell me about your mother's relationship to the events we've been discussing?"
Ryan turned.
His face had gone somewhere I hadn't seen it go before.
Not anger.
Something older and heavier than anger.
"Lily," he said.
"When was she born?"
"The intake assessment estimated she was approximately three years old eight years ago," Sousa said.
"Which would put her birth at roughly eleven years ago."
"Eleven years ago," Ryan said.
"The same year we got married." He looked at me.
"My mother didn't come to our wedding.
I told you she was ill.
She wasn't ill." He stopped.
"She had told me two months before the wedding that if I married you, she would consider me g*ne.
I didn't tell you that either."
The room was very still.
"She said you weren't right for the family," Ryan said.
"That was the phrase she used.
Not right for the family." He looked at Sousa.
"My mother comes from money.
Old money.
She had specific ideas about what my life was supposed to look like, and my wife wasn't part of them."
"And when your wife became pregnant," Sousa said.
"She would have seen it as permanent," Ryan said.
"As something that couldn't be undone." He sat back down.
His voice had gone very quiet.
"Lily.
She took Lily."
"We don't have full confirmation yet —"
"She took our daughter," Ryan said.
"She had someone take our daughter when she was three years old and put her in the system so she would disappear.
And when Ava got old enough — when Ava started to look like Lily, when Ava started to be a real person who might someday ask questions or find records or simply exist as proof of what had been done —" He stopped.
"She hired Gerald Marsh to make sure that didn't happen."
Sousa didn't confirm or deny it.
But he didn't write anything down either.
He just looked at Ryan with the expression of someone who had already reached the same conclusion two hours ago.
"Where is Diane Calloway?" I asked.
"We have people at her residence now," Sousa said.
My phone buzzed again.
Same unknown number.
This time it was not a text.
It was a photograph.
A photograph of Gabriella's preschool.
Taken from outside the fence.
That morning.
Gabriella visible through the chain-link, playing in the yard.
May you like
I showed it to Sousa without a word.
He stood up and had his radio out before I finished handing him the phone.
