“Please take my little sister with you – she can’t take it anymore.”
The winter wind cut across the deserted highway, stinging Marcus Hale’s face as he walked with his head bowed. Once a respected tech CEO, now a man who traded conference rooms for solitude, he carried only a backpack and a cane. He avoided the past—just as he avoided people.
That morning, he turned down a side street to escape the city. It should have been another quiet, leisurely stroll. Until he heard—a faint, trembling voice.
Cry.
“Jamie,” the boy replied. “And that is hope.”
The name hit him like a blow. Hope. The name of the girl his fiancée had once told him had died in childbirth—a child he had never met.
The truth revealed
On the way to the next diner, Marcus asked about her mother.
“Her name was Evelyn,” Jamie said. Marcus almost stumbled. Evelyn was the woman he had loved and lost—the woman who had disappeared before her wedding. She never mentioned another child…or why she had disappeared.
At the bar, Marcus fed them slowly. Hope devoured every bite, and Jamie looked over her shoulder as if someone might kidnap her.
“You’re safe now,” Marcus promised.
An unimaginable past
That night, Marcus called a private investigator. The next morning, the truth hit him with a bang.
Evelyn had died in a fire four months earlier and was living under a false name in a small town. She had hidden from Richard Voss—Marcus’s powerful business rival—after discovering documents that could have ruined him.
She fled to protect her children… and Marcus.
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