Chapter 17 - The Video
We watched the memory card in a police interview room at two in the morning.
The video was old, grainy, dated thirty-six years earlier.
A younger Maris sat at a kitchen table, crying.
Henry stood behind her.
Claire - my biological mother - was in a hospital bed at home, weak and pale, holding a newborn.
Me.
Victor's voice came from behind the camera.
"Give him to me."
Claire shook her head.
"No."
"He's my son."
"You told me to get rid of him."
Silence.
Then Victor said, "That was before I knew what Henry's father was leaving them."
Claire looked directly toward the camera.
"You don't want Noah. You want access to the Sterling family."
Victor moved closer.
Henry stepped between them.
The video jolted.
Maris shouted.
Then Claire said the sentence that explained everything.
"If anything happens to me, Henry raises him. Not Victor. Never Victor."
The recording ended.
I sat there unable to speak.
Ortiz finally said, "This establishes motive going back decades."
I stared at the dark screen.
"It establishes that my entire life started as a fight over money."
Henry's voice came from behind me.
"No."
He had been brought down by wheelchair.
"Your life started because Claire loved you enough to make a choice. The rest of us failed in different ways afterward."
Maris stood beside him under guard.
Her face was wet with tears.
"I should have told you."
"Yes."
"I thought if you knew Victor was your father, you'd think Henry wasn't."
I looked at Henry.
The man who taught me to ride a bicycle.
The man who sat through every bad school play.
The man who had spent eleven years drugged and hidden because he refused to surrender my future.
"DNA doesn't get to erase that," I said.
Henry looked down quickly.
Maris closed her eyes.
Then Ortiz's phone rang.
She listened.
"Victor is talking."
"About what?"
"Everything."
She looked at Maris.
May you like
"Including the night Henry disappeared."
And Maris whispered, "Then he's going to say I was there."
