CHAPTER 4 — THE SECOND CHILD
Ethan couldn't breathe.
The words echoed inside his head long after Eleanor's police car disappeared into the night.
"That child is not the only one."
He turned to Olivia.
"What does she mean?"
Olivia slowly sat down, her hands trembling for the first time since they reunited.
"There was another baby..."
Silence swallowed the room.
"When the fire happened, I was carrying twins."
Ethan felt the floor disappear beneath him.
"I woke up in a small hospital two weeks later. The doctors told me only one baby survived. I believed them."
She wiped away tears.
"But I never saw the second baby's body."
For years, she had convinced herself the child had died before birth.
Now...
She wasn't so sure.
The next morning, Ethan reopened every medical record from five years earlier.
Most files had been destroyed.
Others had mysteriously vanished.
But one retired nurse agreed to meet him in secret.
The elderly woman looked terrified.
"I've waited years for someone to ask."
She handed Ethan an old hospital bracelet.
Baby Carter.
Male.
Time of Birth: 2:17 A.M.
Status...
Transferred.
"Transferred where?" Ethan demanded.
The nurse burst into tears.
"They forced us to lie."
"Who?"
She whispered only one name.
"Eleanor."
That same evening, Ethan and Olivia secretly entered the abandoned hospital where the twins had been born.
Hidden inside an old storage room, they discovered boxes of forgotten patient files.
Olivia suddenly stopped.
On the floor lay a small blue knitted blanket.
She recognized it instantly.
"I made this..."
She had knitted two identical blankets while pregnant.
One pink.
One blue.
The blue one had disappeared after the fire.
Someone had kept it.
As Ethan reached for the blanket, footsteps echoed through the hallway.
Several masked men surrounded them.
A cold voice spoke from the darkness.
"You should have accepted the past."
A tall man stepped forward.
He wasn't there to kill them.
He was there to warn them.
"If you keep searching..."
"...they'll kill the boy before you ever find him."
Before Ethan could grab him, the stranger vanished into the darkness.
Back in the empty hallway, Olivia collapsed into Ethan's arms.
"My son is alive..."
Ethan held her tightly.
"No."
"Our son."
Far away, inside a luxurious private boarding school in Switzerland...
A twelve-year-old boy with the last name Carter quietly closed his history book.
He had no idea his real parents had spent five years believing he was dead.
But someone else already knew.
Watching him through a security camera...
Victor Langford smiled.
May you like
Even from prison...
His final move had already begun.
