Chapter 4 - The Broken Altar
The sight of her flinching from me shattered whatever remained of my pride. I dropped the heavy flashlight into the dirt, sank to my knees on the rusty metal floor of the van, and bowed my head until my forehead touched her torn sandals.
“Megan,” I wept, the tears burning hot tracks through the dust on my cheeks. “I know. I know everything. I found Hazel.”
Her entire body went rigid. The ragged, shallow breathing stopped completely for three agonizing seconds. Her sunburnt hands trembled, releasing the grip on her protective posture, and hovered over the crown of my head as if trying to determine whether I was a ghost or a monster.
“Hazel?” she gasped, a strangled sound breaking from her dry throat. “You found my baby girl? Walter said... Walter said she died on the operating table in Memphis when she was three months old. He sent me a death certificate from the county coroner.”
I looked up into her hollow, beautiful face. Her blue eyes, once full of laughter in our farmhouse kitchen, were sunken into dark purple sockets, but the fierce, primal fire of a mother protecting her young still blazed in the center of them.
“Walter lied to you,” I said, gently reaching out to touch the soft cheek of Mason, who was stirring against her chest. The baby let out a tiny, soft sigh, his little fist brushing my knuckle. “Walter brought her to Nashville. He and Tiffany kept her hidden in the east wing carriage house with a private nurse. She’s alive, Megan. She had the heart repair surgery. She’s breathing on low oxygen, but she’s alive, and she’s waiting for you.”
A sound torn from the deepest corner of human grief and salvation broke from Megan’s chest. She didn’t slap me. She didn’t curse my name for the thirteen months of hell she had endured on the backroads of Tennessee. She simply pulled the twins closer, collapsed forward against my shoulder, and wept until her entire body shook with convulsions.
“I tried to tell you that night,” she sobbed against my neck, her tears wetting my shirt collar. “I was going to surprise you with the ultrasound picture at dinner. But Walter met me in the hallway. He showed me the fake hotel receipts and said if I didn't sign the voluntary exit paper, you’d use your underground freight crews to make sure I disappeared forever. He made me believe you hated me so much you wanted me dead.”
“I was blind, Megan,” I said, wrapping my jacket around her and the boys before gently scooping all three of them into my arms. “I was the biggest fool who ever walked the streets of Nashville. But that ends tonight.”
I carried them out of the rusted van and walked through the briars toward the truck. The boys weighed almost nothing—fragile bundles of skin and bone in worn, hand-me-down rompers. I placed Megan gently into the passenger seat, adjusted the climate control to a mild, cool draft, and handed her an electrolyte bottle from my console. She drank two sips, then immediately dipped her finger into the liquid to moisten the lips of the sleeping boys before drinking another drop herself.
May you like
I climbed behind the wheel, locked the heavy doors, and dialed the direct line to the chief of the Metro Nashville Police Department—a man who had known my father for forty years and owed his campaign to our logistics charity foundation.
“Chief Henderson,” I said as the truck peeled back onto Highway 70, heading east toward the lights of Belle Meade. “This is Garrett Sullivan. I need six cruisers, the district attorney on call, and two ambulances at my estate in twenty minutes. There’s a human trafficking and grand fraud syndicate operating inside my walls, and I’m personally delivering the evidence.”
