Chapter 15: The House With the Fountain

Owen's POV

My father's dining table seats twelve, and he was alone at the end of it.

I hadn't been in that room in ten years.

The fountain outside the window ran as it always had, loud and pointless, in a yard nobody walked through.

"You look thin," he said.

"You look seventy."

"I'm sixty-eight."

"Then it's the room."

He set down his fork.

My father was a big man who had gone soft at the edges.

"Margaret is at the Fund lunch until four," he said. "I assume you timed that."

"I did."

"She'll hear you were here."

"I'd like her to."

That earned a very small smile, gone before I could be sure.

I took a seat three chairs down from him and put my phone on the table.

That morning Corinne had sat up in bed and asked me, with her hair a mess, what I was going to do.

I'd told her the plan.

She'd said, "Go. Take your time. Tell me what you find the day you find it."

It was the first time anyone had sent me off to do something hard and expected me back.

I'd kissed her for too long and almost missed the car.

"I need three things," I said to my father.

"Of course you do."

"Piper's medical records, all of them, in her name. Dylan Kessler's file from the Fund. And the paper on his mother's mortgage."

"You flew six thousand miles for paper."

"I flew six thousand miles because Piper walked off a plane in London with a chip sewn into her sweatshirt."

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