My Wife Was 8 Months Pregnant When She Told Me to Spend Christmas With My Ex… I Thought She Was Giving Me Permission. She Was Saying Goodbye Forever.

For one terrible minute, I almost drove to the warehouse district myself. The urge was fierce and stupid. I could picture Adrian bleeding somewhere, and part of me still wanted to save him.

June caught my keys before I reached the door.

“You're not going.”

“He's in trouble.”

“And you have a baby to keep safe.”

We called Detective Chen. Investigators used location data and the background sounds on the recording to narrow the search. I waited in the secure apartment, one hand on my belly, staring at a wall I didn't recognize.

At dawn, Chen called. Adrian had been found in an abandoned office above a warehouse, bruised and dehydrated but alive. He'd escaped a restraint before officers reached the building. Nathan was gone.

“Did he see Nathan?” I asked.

“He says he did.”

Hours later, Adrian spoke to me through a video call arranged by his attorney. One eye was swollen shut. The small tattoo on his neck looked stark against his pale skin.

“Nathan wanted Mom's originals,” he said. “He thinks you're carrying something else.”

“What?”

“A second ledger. Not the one from the bank. Something called the blue book.”

I remembered the yellow blanket my mother knitted. As a child she'd called it our blue book, a silly private joke because I'd always asked her to tell me the same bedtime story, though there was no book at all.

But that couldn't be what Nathan meant.

“I don't have it,” I said.

“He doesn't believe you.”

“Do you?”

Adrian closed his good eye. “I believe you. I should have started there.”

After the call, I unpacked the two bags I'd carried out on Christmas Eve. Under the baby clothes sat the knitted blanket, soft with years of storage. Along one edge, Mom had stitched a tiny navy-blue ribbon.

I felt something stiff beneath the lining.

June brought sewing scissors. Together, we opened a seam and found a slim memory card sealed in plastic.