“Nellie?” he whispered.
She looked at him. Her eyes showed deep fear, not surprise. She turned around and tried to walk away.
“Wait! Please wait!” Alistair ran after her.
Nellie tried to move faster, but one of her crutches broke in half. She fell hard onto the cold ground. A few volunteers ran over to help her up.
“Don’t touch me!” she screamed, covering her face.
Alistair knelt down in the mud a few steps away from her.
“Let me help you,” he said softly.
Nellie looked at him with angry tears in her eyes.
“You helped me enough when you threw me out of your house while I was pregnant,” she shouted.
The reporters heard everything. The cameras went up again. The media manager tried to stop them, but it was too late.
Alistair could not move.
“Pregnant?” he asked.
Nellie pressed her lips together. She looked like she had just said a secret she wanted to keep forever. She stood up with a volunteer’s help and walked back to her tent.
“Nellie, I did not know about a baby,” he called out.
She pulled the blue tarp shut in front of him.
Alistair stayed on his knees while the camera flashes went off around him. He remembered the day he asked for a divorce after she lost three babies. He remembered his mother, Katie Carpenter, telling him that a family like theirs needed a boy to take over the business. He also remembered Olivia Gilbert, the daughter of a rich medicine businessman, and the big contract he signed right after marrying her.
For years, he believed that Nellie took thirty thousand dollars and left town forever.
That afternoon, before getting into his truck, he spoke to his secretary.
“Find out everything about Nellie’s life after she left my house,” he ordered. “I want to know where she lived, who was with her, and why she lost her leg.”
Four days later, the secretary walked into his office looking very sad. He put a birth certificate on the desk and a death certificate right on top of it.
“Doctor, you had a son,” the secretary said quietly. “His name was Sawyer Fields.”
Alistair looked at the date of death and felt his heart break.
The boy died when he was only ten years old at a construction site owned by the Crestview Clinic.
And the signature that hid the accident belonged to his own mother, Katie Carpenter.
Alistair sat back, terrified of what he was about to find out.
PART 2
Alistair read the papers until the sun came up. Sawyer was born eight months after the divorce. On the birth certificate, the father’s name was blank. Nellie raised him alone in a tiny room in a poor neighborhood. She worked early mornings cleaning train stations and collected cardboard in the afternoon to get money.
