Chapter 6 - WHAT MARLENE REMEMBERED
Marlene looked older in the interrogation room.
Not because time had passed.
Because the lies had finally stopped holding her upright.
Her hair was tangled. Her face was hollow. Her wrists were cuffed to the metal table. When Steven entered with Nate, she looked at him and immediately began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Steven stayed standing.
“For what?”
“For everything.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Marlene wiped her face with shaking hands.
“When Mom got sick, she started talking more. She kept mixing up names. Mine. Yours. Abby’s.”
“Tell me what you know.”
She looked down.
“When you were little, Mom had another baby.”
Steven frowned.
“What?”
“A girl. Before me. Before Dad died.”
The room went silent.
Marlene continued.
“Her name was Lila. Mom said she was sick. She said she died. But I saw her once when I was four. Mom had her in the basement. She was maybe two years old.”
Steven could barely breathe.
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. Mom said she was gone. Then she made me promise never to say her name.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because Riley kept asking for you.”
Marlene looked up, tears running down her face.
“And I remembered you asking for someone too. When you were ten. You kept saying you heard a little girl crying under the floor.”
Steven remembered.
He had thought it was a dream.
A nightmare born from being locked in the cellar.
But maybe it had been real.
“Mom took children,” Marlene whispered. “Sometimes parents paid her. Sometimes they were desperate. Sometimes she said she was saving them from worse homes. But it got darker. She started keeping records. She liked having power over people.”
“And you helped her.”
“Yes.”
The word was barely audible.
“I was scared of her.”
“You were also an adult.”
“I know.”
There was no excuse in her voice now.
Only grief.
Marlene gave police the final piece of information needed to locate Abby.
June had used a retired family court clerk to falsify private-placement documents. The clerk was dead, but his records led investigators to the Oregon couple who adopted “Anna Bell.”
Three days later, Agent Fallon called Steven.
“We found her.”
Steven had to sit down.
“Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“Does she know?”
“Not yet. She’s eighteen now. Her adoptive parents are cooperating. They love her. They had no idea she was taken illegally.”
Eighteen.
Abby had survived.
She had grown up.
She had gone to school, made friends, lived a life that June had nearly erased.
The reunion would take time. Lawyers and therapists had to prepare everyone. Her biological mother was still alive too—older, devastated, and never forgiven by people who had told her she imagined the truth.
That night, Steven sat on the floor of Riley’s new bedroom.
Riley was building a tower from blocks.
“Did they find the girl?” he asked.
“They did.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s alive.”
Riley smiled.
Then he placed a block on top of the tower.
“Good.”
The tower tipped sideways and collapsed.
Riley stared at it.
Steven waited for tears.
Instead, Riley laughed.
A real laugh.
Small at first.
Then louder.
Steven laughed too.
The sound filled the room, warm and strange.
Outside, snow began falling over Spokane.
Inside, the house held no locked doors.
No hidden rooms.
No chains.
Only a boy who was learning that a loud noise did not mean punishment was coming.
And a man who was learning that returning to the place he feared most had not destroyed him.
May you like
It had given him a reason to stay.
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