Chapter 4 - Before We Were Parkers
Until that night, I believed we'd moved from Maryland to Pennsylvania because Dad got a better job. Mom had said the new town had good schools. She had let me choose yellow curtains for my room. I thought that was the whole story.
Her real name had been Sarah Whitcomb. She once kept the books for a company called Alder House Management, which owned apartment buildings in Baltimore. Six years earlier, a fire tore through one of those buildings. Three people died, including Mom's best friend, a night custodian named Lena Ortiz.
"The papers called it faulty wiring," Mom said. Her voice was rough. "But I knew the company had paid a contractor to disable the alarms while they renovated. The safety invoices had been changed afterward."
She had found the original invoices in a backup folder, along with payments to an inspector who certified doors he'd never checked. She took them to a federal investigator. Months later, someone tried to force her car off a highway. That's when the government moved us and gave us new identities.
"Ryan knew?" I asked.
"He knew we had to disappear. He did not know every name in the investigation, and he never saw the evidence. I thought keeping those things separate would keep him safe."
I remembered Dad complaining about having to leave friends and family behind. I remembered how often he said Mom owed him for it.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because your job was to be a kid." Her voice shook. "That was the one thing I wanted the move to give you."
Nolan stood at the door, giving us privacy without leaving us alone.
"Is that why Dad was yelling about your mouth?" I asked.
Mom nodded. "I received a message this morning. Someone wanted the only surviving copy of an old payment record. I said no."
"Where is it?"
"Not in the house."
Nolan's phone rang. He listened, his eyes moving from Mom to me.
"We searched Ryan's phone," he said. "There's a payment from a company tied to Alder House. Eighty thousand dollars. It cleared last Friday."
May you like
Mom gripped the hospital blanket. "He sold our address."
And for the first time, I understood that the man I'd called Dad had given somebody else a map to our door.
