Chapter 2: Hot Chocolate and Paper
Mabel met them at the service entrance with towels, a bassinet borrowed from a neighbor who asked no questions, and the tight mouth of a woman who had worked for the Warrens long enough to smell trouble in a sealed envelope.
Casey returned with forms and a checklist. Temporary placement in the home under supervision. Daily check-ins. Medical evaluation for the infant within twelve hours. School enrollment conversation for Charlee if guardianship held. Spencer signed where Victor told him to sign. Charlee watched the pen as if it might steal Dexter by magic.
“You’re allowed to eat at the table,” Spencer told her in the kitchen, awkward as a man learning a language. “You’re allowed to ask for more.”
Charlee nodded, then asked if Dexter was allowed to keep the blue blanket even though it had been in the bag. Spencer said yes. Mabel washed the blanket on gentle and returned it smelling of ordinary detergent instead of rain and cardboard.
Victor arrived after dark with a private investigator on speaker and a preliminary pull on clinic access logs. The password from the letter had been used fourteen months earlier—not by Spencer. The terminal ID traced to a workstation under Pamela’s department. Jocelyn Cooper’s file showed a successful pregnancy, a delivery at a private hospital, and a discharge with the infant. Three weeks later, Jocelyn had filed a workplace complaint against a partner at her firm, then withdrawn it. Two days after that, she had stopped answering her phone. Missing-person report, filed by a cousin, still open.
Spencer stood in the library with the lights low and felt the old sterility diagnosis rearrange itself into something uglier: not the end of a line, but a line stolen and nearly discarded against his wall.
Charlee appeared in the doorway in new pajamas, holding the teddy bear. “Is the bad person going to come back for him?”
“No,” Spencer said, and made the word a decision rather than a hope. “Not while you’re under this roof. Not while I am.”
She considered him, seven years old and already an auditor of adult promises. “Okay.”
When she left, Victor said quietly, “The third person who knew the password.”
May you like
Spencer’s jaw tightened. “My cousin Julian. Household counsel on the family trust. He has keys. He has opinions about pure bloodlines. He had dinner in this house last month.”
Victor wrote the name down as if it burned the page.
