He sighed. “Look, you will. We’re taking the plane, and I’ll explain on the way. We have to move, though. It’s important, okay?” He moved in and rested a hand on my shoulder. “Bobby, please. Trust me.”

There were only a few people, less than five in my whole life, who deserved to make that request, but Ryan was one of them.

“You better make that explanation fast,” I advised.

***

I didn’t see Carly, not while I was hurriedly throwing jeans, sweaters, and a leather jacket into my duffel bag. I’d have to call her, because I had a feeling she wasn’t coming with me. If she were, she’d have been up here packing too.

I met Ryan at the front door. “Who’s staying with her?”

“Dave’s keeping watch.”

We were out the door in the next few minutes and, far sooner than I liked, we were in the air, Carly’s small private jet speeding through the air, powering us north.

There were plenty of things I didn’t like, a few things I hated. And even fewer that I was outright afraid of.

Flying was one of them, especially when it was in something that looked like an oversized child’s toy. Usually, I had Carly to help me through it. Holding my hand, whispering things in my ear to keep me distracted.

I really didn’t want Ryan to do any of that, so I suffered through it.

Finally, I managed to convince myself we weren’t going to plunge down to the earth in a fiery burning ball and I unclamped my hands from the armrests. I opened one eye. Then the other.

Ryan was watching me.

“Less than fifteen minutes that time. You’re getting better.”

Hoarsely, I said, “Suck my dick.”

He didn’t smile. Instead, he reached into the seat next to him and picked up the folder there. He placed it in my lap.

“You wanted an explanation. Read it.”

***

I managed to hold it in until we landed and disembarked, but the second my feet were on solid ground, I stumbled a few feet away and went to my knees. There, I puked up everything I’d eaten that day. And then it felt like I puked up everything I’d eaten in the last six months.

“How?” I asked finally. I spit once, then twice.

“I don’t know if there’s a simple answer to that,” Ryan said.

A bottle of water appeared in front of me. My stomach heaved at the sight of it, but the taste in my mouth was threatening to send me into revolt again, so I took a chance. Slowly, I pushed back onto my heels and accepted the bottle. I rinsed out my mouth, and then spat out the water.

I hated flying, but I hated throwing up more. I could count the number of times I’d done it on one hand, and two of those had been when I’d had the stomach flu.

“They’re certain it’s him?” I asked.

“The guy who wrote the letters?” Ryan clarified and then nodded without even waiting for me to answer. “Pretty certain. There was a letter left at the house. They were keeping it quiet, but they ran it through the databases. The match came in pretty fast. We...” He hesitated.

I asked the next question I needed an answer to. “How do they know she’s mine?”

“We’d already done the legwork on that one.”

We? I looked at the file he was holding now. The file that held a picture of nine year-old Haley Haskell.

My daughter.

She hadn’t been born when I’d gone to jail almost ten years ago. Her birthday was in a couple months.

“Who is we?” I asked even though I already knew the answer.

“Carly asked me to do it,” he said after a moment.

I turned away, staring out across the airport. It was small and private, but we weren’t alone. The crew was bustling around, but giving us an illusion of privacy. That wouldn’t last much longer. Already, off in the distance, I could see a couple of cars winding their way toward us. Unmarked cop cars. They practically gave off their own scent.

“If you were able to find her–”

“It wasn’t easy.” Ryan cut in.

I turned to look at him. He was watching the two cars drawing closer and closer to us. “It was a closed proceeding, as you know. It took greasing some palms and digging to get her name.”

“Why’d you do it?” I demanded, advancing on him. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt as a thought hit me. “Did Ridley know? Was Ridley involved in this?”

“Easy, Bobby,” Ryan said. He caught my wrists and squeezed. “Calm down. I did it because Carly needed to know.”

“Why!?”

“Because she loves you.” His voice was quiet. “She needed to know your daughter was safe.”

That sucked the air out of me, and I all but sagged, barely able to support my own weight. Ryan continued to hold my wrists, but now he was holding me up too.

His gaze was level. “Her own mother raised her – if you could even call it that – and her life sucked. She had to know the girl was with people who loved her.”

My mind spun back.

“Do you think about her?”

“Don’t you want more, though? I mean, you’re out now. You can take care of her.”

“You’re good people.”

“Sometimes the people who raise you aren’t the good people they should be, though.”

Swallowing, I let go of his shirt and he released me as I turned away. “You did this right after Carly and I got together, didn’t you?”

“No. I started looking right after we hired you full-time.”

I turned to stare at him but he just shrugged.

“It took me about six weeks to get the information. Carly hinted that you might want to know, so I started the search. But she didn’t ask again until you got together. I showed it to her then, letting her decide, and she let it go. She said you only wanted to know she was happy.”

“She is...” Fuck, I shoved the heels of my hands against my eyes. “She was, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah. Her mother – her adopted mother, I mean...”

“That was her real mom. He’s her real dad. I’m just a...sperm donor,” I said, feeling more bitter than I could remember feeling in a long time. Bitter for the life I’d lost. The child I’d never known. “But they love – loved her.”

“We’ll find her, Bobby,” he assured me. “This bastard, he’s just fucking with you. He’s doing this to get you here.”

I lowered my hands and stared at Ryan, anger burning away the bitterness. “Yeah? Well, he got his wish.”

And if I had anything to say about it, it might just be his last one.

***

It was the same guy. Had to be. The type of paper was generic as hell. Even the font was nothing special, the default for pretty much every PC word-processing program.

But the message...yeah. That was sort of unique.

Tell Bobby a child’s life for a child’s life.

The words echoed in my head.

“Mitchell.”

At the sound of Ryan’s voice, I looked up.

Two cops were sitting across from us. It was a familiar set up, almost as familiar to me as my own name at this point. Ryan sat next to me, so that was something new. Lawyer he might be, but he wasn’t here because he was being paid. He was here because he had my back. That was also a new thing for me. Unsettling, in a way. I wasn’t sure if I deserved that unwavering support. Not from him, not from Carly. Not from any of them.

But I had it nonetheless.

And with my daughter’s life on the line, I wasn’t about to turn it away.

As Ryan’s resolved gaze connected with mine, I pushed everything out of my head and tried to focus. He’d help. He was a smart bastard and a resourceful one. Everything he could do, every string he could pull, he’d do it. I’d need that. My daughter...my throat tried to lock up on me.

Clearing the blockage away, I asked, “What about him?”

“I’ve done some digging. It looks like his parents split up a few years after he died.”

I frowned. “After I killed him.”

Ryan’s shoulders tensed slightly under the polo he wore. “Yes. They split up. His mother, Lois, she still lives in Louisville near her surviving son, Dale. The father, though, he sort of fell off the grid.”