Chapter 10 - The Father in the Report
The girls were not taken from me.
Not that day.
Detective Ortiz persuaded the court to place them temporarily in the pediatric wing under supervised family access while the criminal investigation continued.
Still, I had to sit in a conference room and listen as strangers discussed whether I was safe enough to be their father.
I wanted to hate them.
Instead, I kept hearing Rosalyn.
No cage.
The bars had been my idea.
Hilda suggested them after Elena died, saying the nursery windows were a kidnapping risk.
I approved the work without asking what a barred window might feel like to a child.
That afternoon, I removed myself from the company's daily operations.
My board chairman called within five minutes.
"Graham, you can't disappear during a regulatory crisis."
"My daughters nearly disappeared."
"That is a private matter."
"No. It's the only matter."
I hung up.
Calvin came in with a file from the estate maintenance archive.
"Something you should see."
The nursery bars had been installed by Dawson Secure Residential.
Hilda's cousin owned it.
The work order included modifications I never requested.
The windows opened only four inches.
The hallway doors could lock remotely.
A hidden microphone fed into Hilda's office.
"She built a containment room," Calvin said.
"For toddlers."
"For leverage."
We found another hidden line in the invoice.
Emergency transport access through the service courtyard.
Hilda could move the girls from nursery to vehicle without crossing a monitored public hallway.
The system I paid for had been designed around kidnapping them.
Then Detective Ortiz called.
Police had reached the abandoned hospice.
Hilda was not there.
The blue evidence case was.
Empty.
But on the floor beside it they found something else.
A child's pink hair ribbon.
Rosalyn's.
I stared at the photograph.
"That ribbon was in the suitcase from Hilda's car."
Ortiz went silent.
"Yes."
"Then someone else moved it."
"Yes."
"Hilda has help."
"We believe so."
A second image arrived.
Footprints in the dust.
Two adult sets.
Then a third.
Small.
Child-sized.
I stood so quickly the chair hit the wall.
Ortiz's voice sharpened.
"Mr. Mercer, your daughters are still in the hospital. We checked."
"Then whose footprints are those?"
May you like
She paused.
"We don't know."
