The police put a patrol car outside the house for the night.
Sarah got there twenty minutes later. Furious. Terrified. Ready to take the girls back to her place.
For once in four years, we didn’t argue about a single thing.
I kissed both of my daughters goodbye at the door.
Then Sophie stopped on the front step.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, kiddo?”
“Was the lady you helped this morning worth all this?”
Everyone in that front hallway went quiet. Sarah. Eleanor, who had come in the second SUV. Daniel. A police officer.
I crouched down in front of my daughter.
“Yes.”
Sophie frowned. “Even now?”
“Especially now.”
“Why?”
“Because if you’re ever lying on the side of a road someday, I want whoever sees you to stop.”
Her eyes filled up again.
I touched her cheek.
“We don’t decide whether kindness matters based on whether it pays off for us, Soph.” I looked over at Lucy. “We do it because somebody has to.”
After they left, Eleanor stood quietly near my kitchen counter, next to a stack of bills I hadn’t opened yet.
“You have good girls,” she said.
“They have a good mother.”
“And father.”
I didn’t answer.
By midnight, Daniel’s team and the FBI had traced the phone that sent the text. A prepaid phone, bought with cash at a drugstore in Yonkers.
It pinged a cell tower in northern Dutchess County.
Marcus hadn’t gone to the airport at all. He’d left his car there to fool everyone, taken a cab back to a rental, and driven north.
Claire knew exactly where he was the moment she saw the map.
“The Ridgeview property,” she said. “It’s an unfinished resort Vale bought in 2009. During the financial crisis. It’s been sitting empty for fifteen years. He used to go up there when he wanted to be alone.”
The state police found him there just before dawn.
There was no shootout. No car chase. No dramatic confrontation on a rooftop.
Just a frightened, exhausted, desperate man sitting by himself on a folding chair in the middle of an unfinished hotel lobby, with concrete floors and no windows, surrounded by boxes of documents he’d been feeding into a fire in a steel drum.
He hadn’t gotten very far.
And he had one laptop with him.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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