He Ransomed His Secret Son and Left Our Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: One Child
Her husband carries his secret son through the front door while her daughter is still in a basement, and the mistress arrives with a forged paternity test; Marlena calls the police anyway, and at 3:07 a.m. her phone lights up with a message that will burn his world.
Two kids were snatched outside a school at noon.
Before midnight, the men who took them said I could have one back.
My daughter Lily is five.
The other child was a little boy I had never seen in my life.
My husband paid for the boy.
Then he carried him into our house, and the boy called him Daddy.
I was in the kitchen, holding Lily's stuffed rabbit.
She had dropped it on the pavement when the van pulled up.
A police officer had given it to me sealed in a plastic evidence bag.
I tore the bag open and took it out.
My daughter's rabbit was not going to sit in a drawer with a number on it.
"Colin."
I barely recognized my own voice.
"The man on the phone said one child. He said you were taking care of it. Where is Lily?"
My husband laid the sleeping boy on our couch, on the fleece blanket Lily used for movie night.
He pushed the boy's dark hair off his forehead, slowly.
"They made me choose, Marlena," he said. "So I chose."
The rabbit fell out of my hands.
"You chose."
"The Russians wanted the money I moved for the Sartori family. They knew I could only cover one."
He looked at me then.
His eyes were tired and flat.
"One payment buys one child. The other stays with them until the rest is paid."
"Lily has type one diabetes."
I was shaking so hard my teeth knocked together.
"She has no insulin with her. Do you hear me? Three days. Maybe less."
The front door opened again.
A woman walked in.
She was tall and glossy, with diamond studs in her ears at one in the morning.
She went straight to the couch and knelt next to the boy.
"Is he hurt?" she asked, gently.
"He's fine, Valentina," Colin said.
Then he rested his hand on her shoulder.
I knew what I was looking at before anyone explained it.
The kitchen floor seemed to slide sideways.
"Marlena," Colin said, in the calm voice he saved for hard clients. "This is Valentina Sartori. Her father is the man I work for."
He stopped, and for a second I thought he might smile.
"And this is my son."
The refrigerator hummed.
Across the city, in a room I couldn't even imagine, my daughter was alone in the dark with her blood sugar rising.
"Your son," I said.
"He's six. I wasn't going to leave a six-year-old with those men."
Colin stood tall, pleased with himself.
He looked like he thought it was a noble thing.
"Any father would have done the same."
"You have a daughter. She made you a card for Father's Day. It's on that fridge, and you're standing right in front of it."
Valentina sighed.
She truly sighed.
"Just show her, Colin."
"Show me what?"
He took a folded sheet from his jacket and passed it to me.
"I had a paternity test run last month. Lily isn't mine."
It was lab letterhead.
Probability of paternity: zero percent.
"That's a lie."
My voice split right down the middle.
"Eight years. I have never once been with anyone else, and you know it."
"The numbers don't lie, Marlena."
He picked the boy up off the couch.
Valentina took his arm.
"I'll have my lawyer send the divorce papers," she said. "And don't call the police again. My family doesn't like the police."
They walked out of my house together.
His hand sat in the small of her back.
I stood in my kitchen with a fake lab report in my hand, and out in the dark my daughter's body was counting down.
I looked at the fridge.
Lily had drawn the three of us holding hands, with her own head much too big.
I didn't cry.
I picked the rabbit up from the floor and pushed it deep into my coat pocket.
Then I took out my phone, walked onto the porch in the rain and dialed 911.
Colin was still on the front walk, the boy asleep on his shoulder.
"Put that away," he said.
"My daughter has been kidnapped," I told the dispatcher, loud enough for every word to carry. "My name is Marlena Hargrove. I'm on Linden Street in Bayonne."
Valentina stopped with her hand on the car door.
She studied me for a long moment, and then she smiled.
They drove off anyway.
Nobody stopped them.
But there was something Colin didn't know.
His fake lab report was not the only DNA test in play that night.
Six months earlier, I had spit into a plastic tube and mailed it to an ancestry company.
I grew up in foster care, and I had never met one person who shared my blood.
At 3:07 that morning, while I sat on the kitchen floor with a stuffed rabbit in my lap, my phone lit up.
It was a notification that would burn Colin's whole world to the ground.
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