I swallowed.
“He disappeared twenty-three years ago.”
The boy’s face changed instantly.
Not confusion.
Fear.
He looked past me toward the store entrance.
“Aidan?”
He stepped backward.
“Where are you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
He went pale.
Before I could ask why that mattered, he turned, pushed through the small gate beside the register, and ran.
“Aidan!”
People stared.
I left my groceries and followed him.
He ran through the automatic doors and across the parking lot.
I wasn’t exactly built for chasing teenagers, but fear gave me more speed than I knew I had.
“Aidan, wait!”
He reached an old blue pickup truck.
Then I shouted the only thing that came into my head.
“My brother’s name was Everett Sloan!”
Aidan froze.
Slowly, he turned around.
That terrified me more than seeing him run.
“You know that name,” I said.
He stared at me.
Finally, he whispered, “You’re Wren.”
My knees nearly gave out.
“How do you know my name?”
His eyes filled with tears.
“My dad has a picture of you.”
I grabbed the side of the truck.
“Who is your father?”
Aidan looked down.
Then he said, “His name is Ellis.”
I knew immediately that wasn’t the answer.
“What was his name before Ellis?”
The boy wiped his face with his sleeve.
“I think you already know.”
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting across from Aidan in a small diner while he called his mother.
I couldn’t stop staring at him.
He had Everett’s hands.
Even the way he tapped his thumb against the table when nervous was the same.
Aidan told me his father was alive.
Living less than an hour away.
He was forty years old.
He had a wife.
Two children.
And until that morning, Aidan had believed his father had no family before moving west.
“Why did you run?” I asked.
Aidan looked embarrassed.
“Dad told us years ago that if anyone ever approached us asking about Everett Sloan, we should leave and call him.”
My heart hurt.
“He was hiding.”
“I think he was scared.”
“Of what?”
Aidan shook his head.
“He never told me.”
An hour later, a woman named Laurel arrived.
She was Everett’s wife.
She studied my face for a long moment before sitting down.
“I knew this day would come eventually,” she said.
“Where is my brother?”
“At home.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
She nodded.
“Aidan called him.”
“And?”
Laurel’s eyes softened.
“He hasn’t stopped crying.”
I thought I would feel angry when I finally saw Everett.
For twenty-three years, I had imagined that moment.
I imagined hitting him.
Demanding answers.
Asking how he could let Mom die without knowing he was alive.
Instead, when Laurel opened the door to their house, I saw a man standing in the hallway with gray beginning at his temples.
He was older. Thinner. His once-blond hair was darker now, with streaks of gray at the temples. But there was no question. He was my brother.
I covered my mouth.
Everett began crying before I reached him.
I slapped him once across the chest.
Then I wrapped my arms around him.
He held me like he was afraid I would disappear.
“You’re alive,” I kept saying.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re alive.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Eventually, we sat at his kitchen table.
Aidan stayed nearby.
Everett’s younger daughter sat upstairs with Laurel.
Then my brother told me what really happened on prom night.
The phone call Felicity remembered had come from Dad.
That surprised me.
But what Everett said next destroyed the picture I had carried of our family for more than two decades.
A few weeks before prom, Everett had accidentally discovered financial records hidden in Dad’s office.
Our mother had inherited money from her parents.
Dad had been quietly taking money from one of her accounts for years to cover gambling debts.
Everett confronted him.
Dad begged him not to tell Mom.
Everett refused.
“I was going to tell her after prom,” he said.
That night, Dad called him and asked him to meet near the bus station.
Everett went.
Dad was waiting in the parking lot.
“He told me Mom was sick,” Everett said.
“What?”
“He said she’d found out I was planning to accuse him of stealing and that it had caused some kind of breakdown. He told me she didn’t want me in the house.”
“That wasn’t true.”
“I know that now.”
Everett stared at his hands.
Dad then showed him two hundred dollars and a bus ticket.
He told Everett that if he came home, he would tell police Everett had stolen the missing money.
“I was seventeen, Wren. I was scared.”
“So you got on the bus?”
He nodded.
“I thought I’d stay away for a few days until Mom calmed down.”
He went west.
Two days later, he called home.
Dad answered.
“He told me Mom wanted nothing to do with me.”
I felt sick.
Everett called again.
Dad gave the same answer.
So Everett wrote Mom a letter.
Then another.
Then another.
None were answered.
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