CHAPTER NINETEEN — Anna
1310 Words
LENA'S POV
I did not tell anyone what I was feeling that night.
Not Axel who knocked on my door at nine and asked through the wood if I needed anything. Not Rook who I heard pause outside my room at eleven, those distinctive footsteps stopping briefly before continuing down the hall. I lay in the dark with the photograph on the nightstand where I could see it and stared at the ceiling and tried to organize twenty two years of missing something I did not know I was missing.
My mother was alive.
That sentence kept coming back around like a wheel that would not stop turning. My mother was alive and her name was Anna Graves and she had been kept by Edmund Hale for twenty years and she had journals. Journals she had been writing every year. To me. A daughter she could not reach.
I pressed my face into the pillow at some point and cried properly for the first time since all of this started. Not the careful crying I had been doing. The ugly kind. The kind that comes from somewhere you did not know was that full.
When it was done I felt emptied out and strangely clear.
I picked up the photograph from the nightstand and looked at my mother's face in the dark.
"I am coming," I said out loud to no one. "We are coming."
Then I put the photograph down and went to sleep.
Ghost was waiting in the kitchen at six in the morning.
He had coffee ready which meant he had been up before me. He looked at my face when I came in and said nothing about the evidence of last night written all over it. Just pushed the mug across the table toward me and sat back down with his own.
I sat across from him and drank my coffee and let the morning be quiet for a few minutes.
"Tell me about my father," I said eventually.
Ghost wrapped both hands around his mug. "David Graves is fifty four years old," he said. "He has been living off grid for twelve years. Before that he was a journalist. He spent years investigating Edmund's network publicly before Edmund's people destroyed his career and his credibility and everything else they could reach." He paused. "He went into hiding because he found out Edmund had connections to people who would do more than destroy his career if he kept pushing."
"He has been hiding for twelve years," I said.
"Yes."
"And investigating this whole time."
"Yes," Ghost said. "He has evidence he has been sitting on for years. Waiting for someone strong enough and positioned well enough to use it."
I thought about that. A man spending twelve years in hiding, building a case against the person who took his wife and his daughter and his life, waiting for the right moment.
"He does not know I exist," I said. "Not really. He thinks his daughter grew up safely with a family."
"Yes," Ghost said quietly.
"So when he meets me he finds out two things at once," I said. "That his daughter is sitting across from him and that she was sold to the man who destroyed his life."
Ghost held my gaze. "Yes."
I sat with that for a moment. The weight of what that meeting was going to be for David Graves. The particular cruelty of finding your child and losing her story at the same time.
"Okay," I said. "Take me to him."
Ghost drove.
Just the two of us. He had told Axel and Rook where we were going and Axel had wanted to come and Ghost had said no with the particular finality that meant the discussion was finished. Rook had said nothing but had put his hand briefly on my shoulder as I walked past him in the corridor and I had understood that as everything he would have said if he were someone who said things.
The drive was an hour outside the city. A small house on a rural road that looked completely ordinary from the outside. Nothing that said a man had been hiding here for twelve years building a case against one of the most connected men in the country.
Ghost pulled up outside and turned off the engine and looked at me. "You do not have to go in today," he said. "We can come back."
"I know," I said. "Let's go."
We got out.
Ghost knocked on the door.
It opened after a moment and the man standing in the doorway was someone I was not prepared for. Not because he was frightening. Because he was familiar. The shape of the jaw. The way he held himself. The eyes that went straight to my face and then went very still.
He knew immediately.
I could see it happen in real time. His eyes moving over my face and finding things there that he recognized from somewhere older than memory.
"David Graves," Ghost said beside me. "This is Lena."
David Graves looked at me and said nothing for a long moment.
Then he said "you have your mother's eyes" and his voice broke completely on the last word.
I had not planned to cry again so soon.
I cried anyway.
He stepped back from the door and we went inside and sat in his small kitchen and he made tea with hands that shook slightly and I watched him move around the space and kept finding pieces of myself in the way he did things. The way he set cups down carefully. The way he checked something twice before he was satisfied. The way he went quiet when something was large instead of filling the space with noise.
I had always done those things.
I had never known where they came from.
He sat across from me and looked at me the way you look at something you have been waiting for without knowing exactly what shape it would arrive in.
"Tell me everything," he said. "From the beginning."
So I did.
I told him about Margaret and the sale and Edmund and the altar and Axel on the bridge and the compound and the DNA results and Margaret's documents and the photograph.
I put the photograph on the table between us.
He looked at it for a long time without speaking.
Then he put his hand flat on top of it and pressed down like he was stopping it from disappearing.
"She is alive," he said.
"Yes," I said.
He looked up at me. His eyes were red but his voice when it came out next was steadier than I expected. Steadier than I would have managed.
"Then we go get her," he said.
Ghost, who had been sitting quietly in the corner the entire time, leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and said "that is exactly what we are going to do."
David Graves looked at Ghost across his small kitchen table and something passed between them. Two men who had been working toward the same point from completely different directions finally sitting in the same room.
"You have been investigating Edmund for years," Ghost said.
"Twelve years," David said.
"And you have evidence."
"Enough to bury him," David said. "I have just been waiting for the right moment."
Ghost looked at me.
I looked at Ghost.
"The right moment is now," I said.
David Graves nodded slowly and stood up and went to a locked cabinet in the corner of the room.
He came back with a file that was thicker than anything Margaret had produced and put it on the table between all of us.
I looked at it.
Then I looked at the photograph still under David's hand.
My mother's serious eyes looking directly at the camera.
- Writer
