Robert kept speaking, as though stopping would destroy him.
“It happened during the county fair. One minute he was beside my wife. The next, gone. We searched for months. Police, volunteers, divers in the river, dogs in the woods. Nothing. No ransom note. No body. No witness who could agree on anything.”
His fingers pressed into his knees.
“My wife never recovered. She kept his room exactly the same for ten years. His shoes by the bed. His drawings on the wall. His little red coat hanging behind the door.” His voice nearly failed. “She died believing he was still alive.”
Joanna felt her anger falter.
Not vanish.
But shift.
Pain recognized pain, even when it did not forgive.
“What does that have to do with my baby?” she asked.
Robert looked at her directly.
“Elias had that mark. My father had it. His mother before him. It appears in my family sometimes. Not every generation. But when it does, it appears almost exactly the same.”
Joanna’s mouth went dry.
“So this baby…”
“My grandson,” Robert said.
The word trembled.
Joanna shut her eyes.
Grandson.
She had spent months building a wall around herself and her child. She had accepted that he would come into the world with no father’s family, no family name that mattered, no one waiting outside the delivery room. And now a stranger in a white coat, with Logan’s last name and Logan’s haunted eyes, was telling her the baby belonged to a history full of disappearance.
Robert leaned forward slightly. “Joanna, what did Logan tell you about his family?”
She laughed once, quietly. It held no humor.
“Almost nothing. He said his mother died. He said you were strict. He said you and he didn’t get along.”
“That part was true.”
“He said he hated hospitals.”
Robert’s eyes flickered.
“He did.”
“And he said…” Joanna hesitated.
“What?”
She looked down at the baby, then back at him.
“He said there were things in his family nobody talked about. I thought he meant money. Or divorce. Or some old scandal.”
Robert’s expression darkened.
“What else?”
Joanna tried to remember. The last months with Logan had blurred after he left. She had pushed the memories away because they were sharp. But now they returned, small and glittering.
