Chapter 3 - The Watcher
The luxury penthouse suite felt far too vast and cold for the fragile reunion unfolding inside.
Evelyn gently laid the sleeping boys on the king-sized bed and pulled the heavy duvet over their small shoulders.
I stood by the wet bar in the living room, pouring a glass of water to steady my uncontrollably shaking hands.
I asked her to sit down and tell me exactly what happened on the day she vanished from Chicago.
She wrapped her arms around herself, staring blankly at the intricate patterns on the marble floor.
She explained that my mother’s lawyers had cornered her at the clinic the exact day she found out she was pregnant.
They presented her with the restraining order and coldly told her I wanted nothing to do with a gold digger.
My chest tightened with an agonizing mixture of violent rage and overwhelming, suffocating guilt.
I told Evelyn that I had spent months looking for her, hiring investigators and turning the city upside down.
She looked up, a tiny glimmer of hesitant hope finally breaking through her guarded expression.
I pulled out my phone, determined to call my mother and aggressively confront her malicious lies right then and there.
Before I could dial the number, a strange shadow passed over the frosted glass of the suite's heavy oak door.
Evelyn gasped loudly and instinctively backed away toward the bedroom where the boys were sleeping.
I held up a hand to silence her and crept quietly toward the entryway.
I checked the digital peephole monitor mounted securely on the wall.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in a dark trench coat was standing perfectly still in the hallway.
He was holding a suppressed handgun down by his side, completely unbothered by the security cameras.
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Evelyn let out a choked sob when she peeked over my shoulder at the high-definition screen.
She whispered that this was the exact same man who had forced her onto a bus out of Chicago six years ago at gunpoint.
