Chapter 2
We watched the memory card in the office above Mercer Market.
I kept Lily beside me.
Not because she needed to see everything.
Because she refused to let Owen and Noah out of her sight, and I had already learned not to take choices away from that child unless I had a reason.
The first video showed a woman sitting alone in a dim bedroom.
Thirty, maybe thirty-five.
Dark circles beneath her eyes.
She looked familiar in a way I could not place.
Then she spoke.
“Daniel, my name is Sarah Carter.”
I stopped breathing for a moment.
Her voice carried something from my childhood.
Not a memory.
An echo.
“If Lily managed to get this to you, then Grant found us or Rebecca finally chose him over the children.”
Lily stiffened beside me.
Rebecca.
Her aunt.
Grant’s girlfriend.
Sarah continued.
“You don’t know me, but your father did.”
My jaw tightened.
“My mother knew too.”
Marco looked at me.
I said nothing.
Then Sarah held up an old photograph.
My father.
My mother.
And a little girl standing between them.
I leaned closer to the screen.
Sarah.
She could not have been older than six in the photograph.
“Your father made sure I grew up as Sarah Carter,” she said. “But Carter wasn’t the name I was born with.”
The room went still.
“My birth name was Sarah Mercer.”
Lily looked at me.
I could not look away from the screen.
Sarah’s voice shook.
“Daniel, I’m your sister.”
Grant had attacked me over this.
Not a rumor.
Not money.
Blood.
The Mercer family had spent thirty-two years telling me I was my father’s only child.
May you like
Apparently everybody involved had agreed on one thing.
I was never supposed to know Sarah existed.
