Chapter 15 - The Girl Was Me
In Grandpa's old photo album I found a picture I had forgotten.
I was twenty-one, home on leave, standing outside the farmhouse with a young woman I'd met at a summer charity event.
Her face was partly obscured by sunlight.
On the back Grandpa had written, Evelyn and Lena, one bright afternoon.
I felt the room tilt.
I had met Lena Ruiz.
Not as a name in a case file, but as a real person.
She had been older than I was, with a warm laugh and an ability to make even Grandpa stop worrying for five minutes.
I remembered her telling me she was thinking of leaving the area.
I remembered giving her my email address.
And I remembered a message I'd received months later, after she'd disappeared, saying she was safe but couldn't explain where she'd gone.
At the time I'd assumed she wanted to start over.
Now I understood why Grandpa had protected that message in the old papers.
Rebecca checked the dates carefully.
The charitable event occurred after the Pier Nine fire, not before it.
Lena had been alive and hiding nearby.
Grandpa had introduced us while deliberately concealing the reason she needed help.
"Your father's message wasn't about you being physically hidden at the fire," Rebecca said.
"He may mean she was hidden to protect you from something."
I retrieved the old email account I hadn't used since joining the Navy.
Hundreds of messages remained archived.
One from Lena stood out.
Its subject line was THANK YOUR GRANDFATHER.
The message contained an attached photograph.
She had taken it at the charity event.
I was standing beside a man in a gray suit.
He had offered to photograph us, then joked about my plans to become an officer.
I zoomed in.
Daniel Price.
Beneath the photograph Lena had written, Don't trust the man who asked about your deployment schedule.
My stomach tightened.
Price had been tracking me before my parents cut contact.
Was my estrangement truly about the Navy, or had Dad forced me away because Price knew I might someday inherit the trust?
A second message arrived in my recovered archive, scheduled years earlier but never opened.
It was from Grandpa.
He wrote that he had discovered Price intended to use my future inheritance as leverage against the family.
He had asked Lena to avoid contacting me so I would not become a target.
The last line made me cry.
I should have told you sooner, sweetheart.
A lifetime of cruelty suddenly looked more complicated, but no less cruel.
Dad might have feared Price.
May you like
That did not give him the right to destroy his daughter to protect himself.
