The room tilted slightly, and I gripped the edge of the desk to steady myself, twenty-five years of assumptions collapsing at once. I had grown up believing my mother died in an accident, a story so vague and unquestioned that I'd never once thought to press for details, some deep, protective part of me always too afraid of what I might find if I looked too closely.
She hadn't died. She'd been taken. And nobody — not one single person in either of our lives — had ever bothered to tell me the difference.
"You're certain," I said, my voice barely holding steady. "You're certain she wasn't killed. That she was taken."
"I'm certain of what I saw that night," the old man said carefully. "Men in unmarked vehicles, the same kind you've apparently already met. She fought. She got at least two o
