Chapter 10 - THE BOY IN THE RED COAT
Noah appeared in a photograph on a missing-person bulletin forty miles north of us.
The bulletin was only three days old.
The boy had last been seen leaving his foster home after receiving a letter allegedly written by his mother.
I thought of my three girls at sixteen and felt panic climb my throat.
Marisol contacted the caseworker and confirmed that an active search was underway.
She told us not to publish his details.
Arthur Vale's private interests were already under scrutiny, she said, but we could not help a frightened teenager by turning him into another spectacle.
That evening I received an unexpected visitor.
Mrs. Walker, ninety-two and frail, arrived in her daughter's car carrying a biscuit tin.
“I saw your girls on television,” she said.
“Thought you might need this.”
Inside were receipts from the first year I had raised them.
At the bottom lay a slip of paper in Mrs. Walker's handwriting.
A man in the hall. January 17. Asked which baby was Lily. Did not give name.
“I didn't tell you,” she confessed.
“I thought he'd frighten you, and you had enough troubles.”
The description she gave matched Arthur Vale when he was younger.
I held her hand.
“You helped me survive,” I said.
“You don't have to apologize for one more thing.”
She squeezed my fingers.
“Then stop apologizing for being angry.”
At eleven that night Sophie heard a sound near the garden shed.
We called the police before opening the back door.
A thin boy wearing a red coat stood beneath our porch light, shivering despite the mild weather.
He carried a canvas backpack and held one hand up to show he was unarmed.
“Are you Emily Carter?” he asked.
I nodded from behind the locked screen.
“My name is Noah.”
His eyes filled with tears when he saw Emma, Sophie, and Lily behind me.
“I think you're my sisters,” he said.
Then he glanced toward the street.
May you like
“And if you've opened that flash drive, none of us is safe.”
