Chapter 8: The Missing Piece
While Mia took Leo to the restroom to change him with supplies Adrian bought from the café’s small essentials shelf, Adrian made one call from the hallway near the kitchens.
He did not call the police.
He called Mara Voss, the private investigator who had handled Elena’s case longer than any agency and who had learned not to waste him with false comfort.
“I found the bracelet,” he said as soon as she answered. “On a toddler matching Niko’s age. He’s with a young girl, maybe nine or ten, answering to Mia. Elena has been using the name Lena. The girl says Elena didn’t come back from an errand.”
Mara was silent for a full second. “Location?”
“Public café for now. I need a hard room, not a station house. If this child bolts into the system cold, I may lose them both again in paperwork.”
“Understood.” Keys already clicked in the background. “Adrian… if Elena is missing and the child is in unofficial care, you are standing on legal thin ice no matter how blood-related you are.”
“I’m aware.”
“There’s something else,” Mara said. “In the last forty-eight hours, two different inquiries hit old nodes of Elena’s file. One through a private counsel associated with the father’s family. One through a hospital records request using an outdated emergency contact form. Someone else is probing.”
Adrian’s free hand curled tight. “How recent?”
“Recent enough that your grocery store miracle is not happening in a vacuum.”
When he returned to the table, Mia was back in her seat with Leo, watchful as a stray animal that had briefly accepted food. Adrian sat slowly.
“There are people looking,” he said, choosing truth over strategy. “Not just me. People my sister was afraid of.”
Mia’s face drained of what little color it had. “Then we shouldn’t have sat down.”
“If you run blind right now, you may run straight into them.” Adrian kept his voice low. “I can put you somewhere locked and quiet tonight. No press. No social workers yet. My investigator will start from Elena’s last known movements and work outward. But I need you to stop treating me as the only threat in the city.”
Mia glanced at the door, then at the windows, then at Leo’s sleeping face. The missing piece of her world—the adult who was supposed to return—suddenly had a shape beyond absence. Elena had not merely vanished into bad luck. She had vanished into a landscape with searchers already moving through it.
“She said if the wrong ones found us, they wouldn’t call me a hero for keeping him alive,” Mia whispered. “They’d call me a problem.”
Adrian’s chest ached. “Then we make sure the right room finds you first.”
May you like
He did not tell her that even he was not yet sure he qualified as the right room.
That doubt, too, belonged to Elena’s absence—and to every year Adrian had spent failing to close the distance before a grocery store door did it for him.
