Instead of heading straight to the landfill, Adrian drove to his penthouse. He needed proof. While Ethan ate a burger Adrian bought on the way, Adrian searched through medical files.
Now that doubt had cracked his grief, the irregularities were glaring. Dates that didn’t match. Authorizations signed while he had been overseas. Large transfers to a transport company he didn’t recognize.
Vanessa stormed in soon after.
“You’re embarrassing yourself over some homeless kid!” she snapped.
“I trusted you with my mother,” Adrian shot back, slamming documents onto the table. “Why are there sedative prescriptions high enough to put down a horse? Why was my signature forged?”
Vanessa stepped backward. Adrian saw her subtly typing on her phone. He grabbed it.
The message draft read: He knows. Move her tonight.
Everything inside him shifted. He locked Vanessa in a guest room and instructed security not to let her leave.
“Take me to her,” he told Ethan.
They drove toward the outskirts of the city, where glass towers gave way to mud and smoke. The landfill stretched like a wasteland under a gray sky. Adrian stepped out in his tailored suit, walking among mountains of trash as Ethan guided him confidently.
They reached a makeshift shelter of plastic and cardboard.
“She stayed here,” Ethan said. “She taught us songs. Drew music notes in the dirt.”
Inside, taped to the wall, Adrian found a charcoal drawing of a piano. Beneath it, in handwriting he knew better than his own: Adrian will come.
His chest ached.
An elderly recycler approached. “They took her,” he said. “Men in a gray van. Headed to the old Brookhaven Sanitarium in the hills.”
Brookhaven was abandoned and remote.
Adrian called the police and his attorney as he drove. Fog swallowed the mountain road as his car sped upward.
At the rusted gates of Brookhaven, silence pressed in. They slipped inside.
Then Adrian heard it.
A faint humming.
A Chopin lullaby his mother used to play.
They followed the sound to a neglected courtyard. Under a twisted tree sat a wheelchair.
A thin woman wrapped in a dirty blanket turned her head.
“Adrian?” she whispered.
He dropped to his knees. “Mom.”
Her face was gaunt, but her eyes were unmistakable.
“I knew you’d come,” she murmured.
Two men burst from the building.
“You shouldn’t be here,” one growled, pulling a knife.
Adrian stepped forward, removing his jacket. “If you touch her, you won’t walk away.”