The Girl and the Deadly End (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery Book 7), стр. 13

“You probably wouldn’t,” Dean tells me. “He’d have called her Mom.”

He pulls a sheet of paper out of another one of the folders and shows it to me. I take it into shaking hands and stare at Jake’s birth certificate. It’s surreal, looking at it. This piece of paper marked a change in the universe. When Jake was born, more than a dozen timers were set. Lives both already begun and not even thought of yet had potential before that moment. But as soon as Jake was born, that potential was gone. Their end was written.

“My mother’s nurse was Jake’s mother?” I ask.

At first, I’m not sure if the words even had any volume, but then Dean nods, and my head spins.

“He was already born,” I say. “She’d already had him when she was my mother’s nurse. I wonder if she already hated him.”

“You feel sympathy for him,” Dean observes.

“Yeah, she does,” Sam mutters.

There’s vitriol in his voice. He’ll never understand. I can’t expect him to.

“That woman destroyed him,” I tell Dean. “She had an affair with her husband’s best friend but passed Jake off as belonging to her husband, rather than the other man. She despised him and tormented him his whole life. Abused him, beat him, starved him. People in Feathered Nest didn’t even know where he lived or that his grandmother lived in that cabin. She systematically dismantled him as a human being until all that was left was raw emotion and primal instinct, including taking his sister and deserting him with an even more abusive father. I won’t ever condone what he did or say that he doesn’t deserve to be punished for it. But the blood of every single one of those people is on Alice Logan’s hands too.”

“Well, she might have been a horrible mother, but it seems she was a good nurse. Your mother has a note in her file that she preferred Alice to any of the other nurses.”

I shake my head, trying to reconcile the vile woman Jake described to me with a nurse gentle and caring enough to have earned my mother’s trust.

“I still don’t understand why my mother was at this hospital. Why would she go there to see a doctor?” I ask.

“There are several visits over the years, but the one on the paper flower had a specific date on it, remember?” Dean asks.

I nod. “Yes. It was the year before I was born. Right before she would have gotten pregnant with me. Near the end of August.”

“That’s what makes it especially interesting.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

Dean reaches into the medical record and pulls out a page. He hands it to me and runs his finger along a specific line of text.

“This wasn’t exactly a routine visit. Your mother had a very specific reason for going to the doctor that day, and I can’t help but think it’s no accident Catch Me chose this date to lure you.”

My vision blurs. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out.

“Emma?” Sam says. The anger that was in his voice when he talked about Jake is gone. “Emma?” He comes and sits beside me, wrapping an arm around me. “What is it?”

I look at him, searching his face for something that makes sense.

“She was there to get the morning after pill.”