But that night, I understood something: you never stop being who you are. You just pretend you’ve forgotten.
We arrived at the waiting room, and there, in that cold space illuminated by fluorescent lights, I saw the scene that would change everything.
Ethan was sitting on a plastic chair, his right eyebrow clumsily bandaged with gauze. His eyes were red from crying so much. When he saw me, he jumped up.
“Grandma!”
He ran toward me and hugged my waist as he did when he was a child. I felt his body tremble against mine. I stroked his hair and whispered:
“I’m here, my boy. I’m here.”
But my gaze had already found the other two characters in that scene.
Rob was standing by the wall, arms crossed and jaw clenched. He looked at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher—shame, anger, guilt.
And next to him, sitting with her legs crossed and a perfectly rehearsed victim expression, was Chelsea. She wore a wine-colored satin robe, as if she had been dragged out of bed. She had a bruise on her left arm that looked freshly made. Her brown hair fell in perfect waves over her shoulders. She looked at me with those big, teary eyes as if to say, “Look what your grandson did to me.”
But I knew that look. I had seen it in dozens of criminals who tried to fool me during my career. The look of someone who knows how to act. Someone who knows how to manipulate.
“Elellanena,” Rob said in a dry voice, without moving from his spot. “You didn’t have to come.”
Those five words hurt me more than any physical blow.
I didn’t have time to respond, because at that moment an office door opened and a man in his fifties came out in an impeccable uniform and a serious expression.
Captain Charles Spencer.
When he saw me, he stopped short.
“Commander Stone.”
“Hello, Charles,” I said calmly. “It’s been a while.”
He approached, clearly surprised.
“No… I didn’t know you were involved in this case. If I had known—”
“Now you know,” I interrupted him. “And I need you to explain exactly what’s going on here.”
Because something told me that what I had heard on the phone was only the tip of the iceberg, and I was about to discover how deep the abyss my family had fallen into really was.
