Adrian's POV
I sat with the photograph for a long time.
The hotel room was quiet around me in the way of rooms that have absorbed a significant amount of thinking and have nothing left to offer except their silence. The malachite was on the nightstand. The toy boat was in my bag, the floor safe having been emptied the morning I drove to Philadelphia the first time, understanding without articulating it that the time for keeping things locked away was over.
Serena.
Not my mother.
Or not only my mother.
I had been building the investigation toward Eleanor with the focused certainty of a man who had identified his primary suspect and was assembling evidence in that direction. The holding company. Thomas Reilly. The authorization code. The financial trail that led cleanly and documentabl
