Chapter 7: What My Mother Took
The police moved toward the Hartwell estate through the hidden road.
I stayed in an unmarked vehicle with Maya and Lauren.
The tracking signal still showed Preston’s phone inside the main house.
But something felt wrong.
Preston wanted Lauren’s phone.
He knew it could track him.
If he understood that, why carry his own phone directly to the estate?
“He left it there,” I said.
Maya looked at me.
“What?”
“Preston knows Lauren tracks him. He wants us to believe he took Sophie to the house.”
Lauren stared at the map.
“He could have put the phone in another car.”
“Or given it to my parents.”
Maya immediately contacted the officers approaching the property.
“Hold position. Possible decoy.”
I called my mother.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Where is Sophie?”
A long silence followed.
“Celia.”
“I didn’t know Preston would take her.”
Her voice shook.
It was the first time I had ever heard fear in it.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You took Sophie’s flower basket.”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Your father told me the drive was inside it.”
“Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Stop lying.”
“I’m not lying. I searched the basket in the bridal suite. It wasn’t there.”
Sophie had said my mother took it.
If the drive wasn’t inside when she searched, someone had removed it first.
“Who else touched the basket?”
“The maid of honor. Lauren’s cousin.”
Lauren’s face changed.
“Amber.”
“Where is she?” I asked my mother.
“She left the hotel before the police arrived.”
My mother started crying.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Quietly, as though the weight of her choices had finally become real.
“Evelyn, your father said this would only scare you. He said no one would get hurt.”
“You helped frame an eight-year-old.”
“I was trying to save the company.”
“You were trying to save Preston.”
“No.”
Her answer came too quickly.
“I was trying to save all of us.”
“What does that mean?”
Before she could answer, someone shouted in the background.
My father.
“Hang up the phone, Celia.”
My mother’s breathing became uneven.
“Martin, please.”
The line went dead.
Maya contacted the officers at the estate.
Seconds later, gunfire cracked through the radio.
I froze.
“Officer down!” someone shouted. “Shots from the second-floor window!”
My father was shooting at police.
But he wasn’t protecting Preston.
The tracking signal remained inside the house because Preston’s phone was there.
Sophie wasn’t.
Maya’s team traced the text messages sent to me from the hospital.
The signal came from a disposable phone traveling south on Interstate 90.
Away from Lake Forest.
Toward an industrial district on Chicago’s West Side.
Lauren zoomed in on the map.
“There,” she said.
A property name appeared beneath the route.
Hartwell Storage and Records Facility.
I knew the building.
May you like
It was where the company kept old financial archives.
And where thousands of paper records could disappear in a single fire.
