Chapter 6 - THE BOY IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
The police found Evan twelve hours later.
He wasn't kidnapped.
He had run away.
He was sitting at a bus station three counties away, holding an old photograph of Lauren.
When I saw him, my heart broke.
He was seventeen.
He looked exhausted and angry.
“I don't need another family,” he said.
“You don't have to have one.”
He looked at me suspiciously.
“Then why are you here?”
“Because your mother asked me to come.”
He stared at Lauren.
“She lied to me.”
Lauren's eyes filled with tears.
“I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
“From them.”
Evan looked at me.
“Who are they?”
I answered honestly.
“I don't know yet.”
That made him laugh bitterly.
“At least you're honest.”
We took him to a safe location.
Rebecca explained the legal situation.
Then Evan revealed something none of us expected.
He had found an old box in the house where he had been raised.
Inside was a letter from Diane.
The letter had been written seventeen years earlier.
It mentioned a payment.
A hospital.
And one sentence that made my father pale:
The second child must never know the truth.
“What second child?” I asked.
Dad didn't answer.
Evan looked at him.
“Mr. Bennett, you know something.”
My father closed his eyes.
“I suspected.”
“Suspected what?”
Dad slowly opened the hospital file.
“There may have been another baby.”
Lauren shook her head.
“No.”
Dad pointed to a birth record.
Two births were registered that night.
One for Evan.
One for another infant.
The second record had been erased.
My stomach tightened.
“Who was the second baby?”
Dad looked at me.
“We don't know.”
Then Evan turned the letter over.
There was a handwritten name on the back.
A name none of us recognized.
Except Lauren.
She whispered:
May you like
“That was the nurse who delivered me.”
And she had died only three months ago.
