“Is there anything else in there?”
Serena dug into the nightstand again and found a handgun in the top drawer, but nothing else of interest. As soon she opened the second drawer, she discovered a metal lock box, which she removed and placed on the bed. The box was secured with a combination lock, but when she pushed the latch aside, she found that the numbers on the lock had been left at the correct combination.
She opened the lid.
“Oh, hell,” Maggie said. “Look at that.”
Inside, they found dozens of photographs, the brightness of their color fading after decades had passed. All of the pictures showed the same thing: Andrea as a teenager, holding a newborn baby in her arms. A boy. The photos showed her feeding her child. Changing him. Grinning as she held her son in the air. The two of them asleep on a blanket in the grass. Serena didn’t think she’d ever seen such happiness and love on a face as she saw in Andrea in those pictures. And it occurred to her that Andrea probably hadn’t had that look of happiness on her face again in the decades since then.
“She didn’t want to give him up,” Maggie said.
“No. That’s obvious.”
“I wonder how long she kept him before her parents made her let him go.”
Serena turned over the pictures and saw dates written in ink on the back. “The photo of her with the newborn is in May. May 14. This one here in the grass is late July.”
“Two months with a child, and then you have to give him up?” Maggie said.
Serena shook her head. “I can’t imagine it.”
“Is there anything about the adoption? The name of the agency? Anything about where the boy went?”
“No. I wonder if her parents even told her. I wonder if they just took him away.”
“Oh my God.”
Serena dug down to the bottom of the lock box. Amid the memorabilia of the few weeks that a young mother had shared with her son, she found a birth certificate. She pulled it out and examined the text. She didn’t notice the hospital, or the doctor, or the time of birth.
Instead, she focused on the one detail that told her everything she needed to know.
“Andrea gave him a name,” Serena said.
Maggie looked at the faded print on the birth certificate where Serena was pointing. “Son of a bitch,” she gasped. “Brayden.”
42
Cat sat with Brayden on the clifftop overlooking the Deeps.
The recent storms had swelled the current, making it a maelstrom of whitewater and whirlpools surging toward the lake. Late afternoon shadows draped the rocks. The river looked angry, and Cat could see a reflection of the water in Brayden’s turbulent mood. His dark eyes had a sunken quality, like twin caves. Greasy cowlicks hung from his hair, and he hadn’t shaved in days. When she put an arm around his shoulder, she could feel his whole body tensed into knots.
“Stride had to kill someone this year,” Cat told him softly. “I saw what it did to him. I saw how it haunted him.”
Brayden shook his head, not wanting comfort. “That was a good shoot. This isn’t the same thing at all. I made a mistake. I killed my — I killed an innocent person. She should be alive right now.”
“You also saved me.”
“Stride did that, not me. And he nearly died in the process.”
“Colly would have kept shooting. Who knows how many others she might have killed? You stopped her.”
“I screwed up,” Brayden insisted.
“I understand that you’re upset. It’s natural.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I can live with this.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m sorry, but you have no idea what I’m feeling. You don’t understand. You don’t know what I did.”
“Try me.”
But Brayden said nothing. He looked lost in a maze, with no way forward. As they sat there, he got a text on his phone, which he read with an expression that somehow deepened the darkness he felt. He shoved his phone back in his pocket without telling Cat who it was, or what it was.
Only seconds later, her own phone rang. It was Serena.
“Is Stride okay?” Cat asked, without even saying hello.
“He’s fine, Cat. This isn’t about him. Where are you?”
“At the Deeps.”
“Is Brayden Pell with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Cat, I want you to leave right now,” Serena told her. “Don’t ask any questions, and don’t say anything. Just come back home.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain when you get here. Don’t tell Brayden about this call, please. Just leave the Deeps by yourself.”
“Sure. Okay.”
Cat hung up the phone, but she made no effort to get up or leave. Instead, she twisted her body around on the rocks and sat cross-legged next to Brayden. Calmly, she brushed back her chestnut hair. She knew he could feel her looking at him, but he stared at the waterfall without acknowledging her.
“So do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Cat asked. “That was Serena. She wants me to leave right away. It’s about you.”
He shrugged. “They know. That was the text I got. They know.”
“Know what?”
“Who I am. I figured they’d find out eventually. Honestly, I’ve thought about coming forward for years, but if I did that, I knew she’d be exposed, too. It wasn’t my secret to share. I knew she didn’t want anyone to know about me. I didn’t care about myself or what would happen to me. I was trying to protect her.”
“Protect who?” Cat asked.
“Andrea.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Andrea Forseth was my birth mother,” Brayden told her. “She had a baby, and no one knew about it. She had me.”
Cat’s eyes widened with shock. Her lips parted, and she covered her mouth with her hand. Then, as the dimensions of the tragedy settled over her, she reached out and put her arms around Brayden’s neck. “No.”
He nodded, his face like granite. “Now she’s dead because of me.”
“Brayden, that was a terrible accident.”
“Really? Because it doesn’t feel like an accident. It feels like fate. Like I’m being punished for what I did seven years ago.”
“What did you do?”
Brayden looked around at the Deeps, as if he could see things here that she couldn’t. “I guess it doesn’t matter who I tell anymore. Now that they know, they won’t have any trouble proving it. I kept everything. It’s all in a box in my attic. Ned’s laptop. His papers. His gun. I guess I thought one day I’d tell Andrea what I did, how I’d saved her. Avenged her. But I can’t tell her about it now, can I? It’s too late.”
“Tell me,” Cat said.
Brayden lay back, stretching out on the rocks. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the trees and sky. He spoke quietly, his voice barely louder than the thunder of the river.
“I didn’t know I was adopted until I was in high school,” he said. “Grace and Bob Pell kept it a secret. It only slipped out when I was a senior, and Bob and I were having one of our usual arguments. He made some comment about someone like me never coming from his blood, and then he told me the truth. That was the first time I knew that I had another mother somewhere else. A mother who’d given me up.”
Cat stayed silent and let him speak.
“Bob Pell didn’t know who she was, how old she was, why she gave me up, anything like that. It was a closed adoption. The only thing he knew was that my birth mother was from Duluth. The weird thing is, knowing all of this finally gave me a purpose in life that I’d never had before. After high school, I moved to Duluth. I loved the lake, and God knows I wanted to get away from my father, but somewhere in my head, I also thought I could track down my birth mother. I wanted answers about where I came from. About why she abandoned me.”