Chapter 35 - Miriam's Daughter
Miriam refused to answer.
Lena sat across from her in the prison interview room while rain struck the narrow window.
“You have a child.”
Miriam smiled.
“So do millions of women.”
“Who?”
“You spent so long trying to prove I wasn’t your mother. Now you’re offended that I might be someone else’s.”
“Your child accessed Aurora.”
Miriam’s smile vanished.
That was the first useful reaction.
“You didn’t know.”
“No.”
“Who is the father?”
Miriam looked toward the guard.
“Leave.”
The guard did not move.
Lena waited.
Finally Miriam said, “Cal Rusk.”
Lena stared.
“Cal?”
“He was nineteen. I was twenty-two.”
“Where is the child?”
“I was told she died.”
Of course.
“By whom?”
“Evelyn.”
Lena almost laughed.
Every road led to a woman who had turned death certificates into curtains.
Miriam’s daughter had been born at Saint Agnes during its hidden years.
Name at birth: Isabelle.
No surname.
Cal was brought from federal custody for questioning.
He went pale when Lena said Isabelle.
“I thought Miriam lied.”
“She says Evelyn told her the baby died.”
Cal sat down.
“I saw the child once.”
“When?”
“Three days after she was born. Then Evelyn said there were complications.”
“Did you see a body?”
“No.”
“Did you ever search?”
“For years.”
“Why stop?”
“Because Miriam threatened to kill me if I said the name again.”
Lena looked through the observation glass.
Miriam stood on the other side.
For once, both parents looked equally broken.
Milo searched adoption records.
Nothing.
Andrew searched medical archives.
Nothing.
Mara searched Celeste’s notebook.
One line.
I took Isabelle to the woman at Mercy Station.
Julian frowned.
“Mercy Station wasn’t built yet.”
“Not the train station,” Elena said.
She remembered a shelter called Mercy Station run by a church outside Bellwether.
Reuben knew it.
“My predecessor ran that shelter.”
Records had been transferred to the church basement decades earlier.
They found Isabelle’s intake card.
New name: Iris Cole.
Reuben sat down.
“Cole?”
The adoptive parent listed was Reverend Matthew Cole.
Reuben’s father.
The room went silent.
“I had a sister,” Reuben whispered. “She died when I was twelve.”
Lena knew better now.
“Did you see her body?”
Reuben looked at her.
“No.”
Iris Cole had supposedly died in a boating accident at sixteen.
No body recovered.
Milo found a school photograph.
Mara recognized her first.
“I know her.”
“From where?”
“Helix Meridian.”
The woman in the photograph, aged by decades, matched the company’s chief privacy officer.
Dr. Iris Cole.
They had interviewed her during the server seizure.
She had been polite, helpful, invisible.
Exactly the kind of person no one remembered.
Federal agents reached her home.
Empty.
Her office.
Empty.
Her bank accounts had been cleared.
Then Reuben’s phone rang.
“Iris?”
His face collapsed.
A woman spoke on speaker.
“Hello, little brother.”
Reuben covered his mouth.
“You’re alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that!” Lena shouted before she could help herself.
Everyone looked at her.
She closed her eyes.
“Sorry.”
Iris laughed.
“You’re Gabriel’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“You destroyed the archive.”
“Most of it.”
“And my mother?”
“In prison.”
Silence.
Then Iris said, “Miriam is not my mother.”
Lena looked at Cal.
He shook his head.
“What do you mean?”
“Evelyn lied to all of you.”
“Then whose biometric key did you use?”
“My own.”
“That means you’re related to Miriam.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Iris’s voice softened.
“Miriam is my sister.”
The line went dead.
Lena stared at the phone.
If Iris and Miriam were biological sisters, Evelyn had adopted both from the same mother.
Which meant somewhere in the Saint Agnes records was a woman whose children had become both the architect and the heir of Aurora.
And that woman had never been named.
Until Mara turned another page in Celeste’s notebook.
There, written in faded pencil, were two words.
May you like
SOFIA’S TWINS.
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