Chapter 5 - The Father Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
The care facility stood beyond a row of bare maple trees outside South Bend. Snow lay in dirty ribbons along the parking lot. Isabella had spent the drive imagining a hundred reunions and fearing every one of them.
What if the man wasn't her father? What if he was, but could not remember her? What if he remembered everything and had chosen not to come home?
Nora sat beside her in the government vehicle. Adrien followed in a separate car with Marco. Two federal agents had arrived ahead of them to secure the building and stop the transfer order.
"You don't have to go in right away," Nora said.
"I've waited seven years."
"That's why I'm telling you."
Inside, the halls smelled of disinfectant and warm oatmeal. A nurse named Denise led them toward a small recreation room overlooking a courtyard.
"He likes the windows," she said. "He doesn't speak much. Sometimes he draws maps. We thought he had worked in transportation."
Isabella stopped outside the door. Through the glass she saw an older man in a faded blue sweater sitting with a pencil over a sheet of paper. His hair had gone white at the temples. A scar ran beneath his left ear.
She knew the way he held the pencil.
When she was eight, her father had taught her to draw trains by beginning with the wheels. He always held a pencil too close to the tip.
"Dad?"
The man looked up.
For a moment there was no recognition. Then his pencil slipped from his fingers.
"Izzy?"
She crossed the room before she knew she was moving. He stood unsteadily, and she caught him around the shoulders. He smelled of soap and wool, not of the motor oil she remembered. But when he put his hand against the back of her head, he did it exactly as he had when she was small.
"You got tall," he whispered.
She laughed and cried at the same time. "I'm twenty-nine, Dad."
He blinked, struggling with the number. "I missed your birthday."
"You missed a few."
His face crumpled. "I tried to come home."
"I know."
"They said your mother was waiting."
Isabella closed her eyes. She could not tell him everything at once. Nora quietly asked the nurse for a private room and a physician who understood traumatic memory.
When Thomas was calm, he began to speak in fragments. He remembered a warehouse, a warning from Daniel Mercer, a woman in a red coat, and the sound of an engine before the explosion. He remembered being carried into a van while someone said, "Keep him breathing. We still need the code."
"What code?" Nora asked gently.
Thomas shook his head. "The records. The safe."
"Where was the safe?"
He looked at Isabella. "The birthday song."
She frowned. "What?"
"You used to change the words. Every year."
Isabella remembered sitting at their kitchen table singing nonsense lyrics to make him laugh. He had always sung one line back: Three blue birds above the door.
"Three blue birds," she whispered.
Thomas nodded, exhausted. "Your mother's painting."
The painting had hung above their apartment door until the landlord cleared the place after her mother's death. Isabella had taken it into storage. Three blue birds on a branch, painted by her mother before Isabella was born.
Nora wrote down the clue without pressing further.
At the entrance, Adrien met a federal agent carrying an updated transfer document. Celeste's company had requested Thomas be moved to a facility with no listed medical director.
"You think she knows we found him?" the agent asked.
"She knew where he was all along," Adrien said.
His phone buzzed. Celeste.
He answered on speaker with the agent's permission.
"Brother," she said brightly. "I hear you're visiting Indiana."
"Thomas Bell is alive."
A pause. "Is that supposed to mean something?"
"It means the people who helped you hide him are speaking to investigators."
Celeste laughed softly. "You're making a mistake, Adrien. You've always needed me to handle the ugly details."
"I needed you to tell me the truth."
"You needed the money. Don't rewrite our history because you fell in love with a servant."
Adrien's jaw tightened. "Her name is Isabella."
"And she's going to destroy everything our father built."
"Then it should have been destroyed years ago."
The line went dead.
Isabella came into the hallway with Nora. Her eyes were red, but her shoulders were straight.
"He's real," she told Adrien, almost disbelieving. "He's really here."
Adrien smiled, a small expression she had rarely seen. "I'm glad."
She reached for his hand. He held it carefully, as though her trust were something that could still break.
"I need to go back to Chicago," she said. "There's something in my mother's painting."
"I'll arrange protection."
"Federal protection," she corrected.
"Federal protection," he agreed.
Before they left, Thomas called Isabella back. He pressed a folded drawing into her palm. It showed the freight terminal, a series of loading bays, and a circle around a building beside the river.
"The girl in red," he whispered. "She wasn't the only one."
"Who else?"
Thomas stared past her. "The man with the silver ring. He told her to make sure nobody could ever find me."
Isabella studied the drawing. A ring was sketched beside the building, with a tiny crest shaped like a wolf.
May you like
She had seen that ring before.
Daniel Mercer wore one on his right hand.
