Part 2: They threw me out at nineteen with almost nothing, but twelve years later they brought a moving truck to my estate expecting to move into bedrooms I never offered them.

I stared at the vibrating screen. Against my better judgment, I slid my finger across the glass and pressed the phone to my ear.

"Hello?"

"Avery?" The voice on the other end was male, low, and laced with exhausting tension. It wasn't Grant. It took me three seconds to place the timber of the voice across a decade of silence.

It was David.

Mallory’s ex-husband. The father of her first two children—the two toddlers who had been strapped into the back of that sweltering crossover earlier today.

"David?" I said, sitting upright in my chair. "How did you get this number?"

"Your shop manager gave it to me after I explained who I was," David said, his voice cracking slightly with emotion. "Avery, please tell me the kids are with you. Please tell me you took them in."

My heart dropped into my stomach. "What are you talking about, David? They were here at noon. They had a moving truck. The police ordered them off my property four hours ago. They left."

A heavy, sickening silence hung on the line. When David spoke again, his breath was shallow. "They told me... Mallory called me three days ago from Richmond. She told me she was losing the apartment, but that you had offered to take the kids for the summer. She said you had a massive estate with five acres and plenty of room, and that they’d be safe with you while she and Grant worked on getting back on their feet. I signed a temporary custody travel waiver so she could bring them across county lines."

"She lied to you, David," I said, my voice rising in alarm. "She never spoke to me. I had no idea they were coming. She brought them here as leverage to force me to give them bedrooms!"

"Oh God," David groaned, the sound raw and gutted. "Oh God, Avery. Grant’s brother called me twenty minutes ago. Grant and Mallory had an absolute blowout fight at a gas station off Interstate 81 near Harrisonburg. Grant dumped the rental truck in a diner parking lot, took the crossover, and left Mallory and your mother at a roadside motel. But David... the kids weren't in the motel room when Grant left."

I stood up so fast my office chair slammed backward against the bookshelf. "What do you mean the kids weren't there?!"

"Grant told his brother that your mother left the toddlers with 'family' before they even reached Harrisonburg," David said, his voice tipping into full panic. "He thought she meant you! He thought your mother dropped the kids off at your house before the police arrived!"

"They didn't drop anyone off here!" I yelled, my mind racing through every frame of security footage from this morning.

I rushed over to the console, rewinding the camera feeds from the gate. I tracked the Penske truck from the moment it pulled up. I watched the silver crossover. The windows of the crossover were heavily tinted. When Mallory had rolled down her window to scream at Deputy Miller, I had assumed the children were in the backseat because she kept pointing toward them.

But now, zooming in on the 4K recording of that open window...

The backseat was empty. There were no car seats. There were only piles of black garbage bags and loose blankets.

Mallory had used the idea of the children to manipulate the police. But where were they?

"David, where were they before they reached my road?" I demanded, my hands flying across the keyboard to pull up the regional map. "Did they stop anywhere between Luray and Ridge Hollow?"

"I don't know," David sobbed openly now. "I’m in Richmond. It’ll take me three and a half hours to get up there. Avery, my babies are three and four years old. Your mother is completely out of her mind. If she left them somewhere to spite you..."

The horror of what Evelyn Claire was capable of began to crystallize in my mind.

Twelve years ago, she had abandoned her own nineteen-year-old daughter without a second thought. To a woman whose entire existence was predicated on selfish survival and narcissistic image, children were not human beings to be nurtured.