“Where is he?!” I screamed, standing up from the chair, my heart pounding with a mixture of fury, betrayal, and agony. “Where is Richard?!”
Dr. Harrison looked down at his desk. “He’s gone, Mrs. Vance. Two weeks after the transplant surgery, once he knew Maya was safe and that you two had connected, Richard turned himself in to the federal authorities. He is currently serving a fifteen-year sentence in a federal prison in Ohio.”
I collapsed back into the chair, buried my face in my hands, and cried until I had no tears left to shed.
Two days later.
I walked into Maya’s room at the rehabilitation center.
Maya was sitting by the window, painting a canvas of a bright, sunlit ocean. She turned around when I opened the door, offering me her bright, radiant smile.
She had no idea. She didn’t know her father was alive, she didn’t know he was in prison, and she didn’t know that the boy whose heart beat inside her chest was her own biological brother. To her, Caleb was just a hero stranger, and I was just a kind woman who had lost her son.
I walked over to her, sat down in the chair beside her easel, and watched her paint.
I looked at her dark hair, the shape of her hands, the line of her jaw. How had I not seen it before? She had Richard’s eyes. She had Caleb’s creative spirit.
I thought about Richard sitting in a cold federal prison cell. I felt a surge of deep, lingering anger for the lies he had told, the abandonment I had suffered, and the fake death that had forced me to raise Caleb alone.
But then I looked at Maya.
I looked at the healthy flush in her cheeks. I listened to the steady, strong rhythm of my son’s heart beating beneath her chest.
If Richard hadn’t orchestrated this, Maya would be dead, and I would be sitting alone in an empty house, surrounded by nothing but ghosts and grief.
“Mrs. Vance?” Maya asked softly, setting her paintbrush down and looking at me with concern. “Are you okay? You look like you’re somewhere far away.”
I reached out, taking her hand—her warm, alive hand—and squeezed it gently.
“I’m right here, Maya,” I smiled, tears of peace finally filling my eyes. “I’m right here.”
