Chapter 7
Adelise did not believe it.
Neither did I.
Not at first.
“My father would have come home.”
Her voice shook.
“Yes.”
I agreed.
That was the problem.
Roland loved his daughter with embarrassing intensity.
Carried her school photograph in his wallet long after she became an adult.
He would not choose absence casually.
So something happened after the escape.
Rafe found the answer through an old family contact in Wyoming.
A roadside clinic.
No official records under Roland’s name.
But the retired nurse remembered him from a photograph.
He arrived with a concussion and fractured ribs after a vehicle rolled down an embankment.
No blood drama.
Just injured.
Disoriented.
He gave a false surname.
Why?
Because two men came searching the next morning.
Vane employees.
Roland left before treatment finished.
After that?
Nothing for three weeks.
Then a mechanic in Montana remembered a quiet older man taking cash work.
Then another sighting.
Then silence.
Adelise stared at the route on the map.
“He was moving away from me.”
Maybe.
Or away from the people watching her.
That same month, Ismeralda arranged Adelise’s first job at my city residence.
I had been told it was charity.
Roland’s daughter needed stability after losing her father.
I approved without meeting her personally.
How generous.
How convenient.
Adelise entered my household.
Under Ismeralda’s eye.
If Roland checked on her from a distance, he would see his daughter inside the very house controlled by people who had already threatened her.
A perfect message.
Stay gone.
She stays safe.
Adelise understood too.
“She hired me to keep him away.”
Her face went white.
Not kindness.
Leverage.
I looked at Ismeralda.
She shook her head.
“That’s not why.”
“Then why?”
Silence.
Because even if she had partly wanted to help, she now understood the effect.
Intent again.
Not enough.
Then Rafe entered.
“One more thing.”
He placed a recent photograph on the table.
A roadside diner in Montana.
Three months ago.
An older man sitting by the window.
Gray in his hair now.
Thinner.
Still unmistakable.
Roland Fernwick.
Alive.
May you like
Adelise stopped breathing.
I had spent eighteen months honoring a dead man who had been watching the world from a distance, waiting for the day his daughter was no longer useful as leverage.
