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B ack at the apartment, Sadie couldn’t settle. She paced and paced, and in between she put on more coffee, realizing she didn’t need more, but drank it anyway and kept pacing.

Morrison looked at her time and time again.

When it was too much for him, he had to intervene.

“After she went grocery shopping, we handed her off. It was a strategic decision and a necessity. We did that so we weren’t caught in the act,” he explained, “and, no, I haven’t heard any report yet from those who followed her. ”

She frowned. “Why did you come back here? We could have kept following her. She had no idea.”

“Because of you,” he added. “Your energy was getting pretty unsettled, almost as if it was surging all over the place. That isn’t good if you don’t want to be noticed.”

“How am I supposed to be calm? There is a damn-good chance that was my nephew back there.”

“Possibly, but how does that change anything right now?”

She slumped into the chair beside him and whispered, “It doesn’t, yet in many ways it does.”

“No,” he corrected, “it doesn’t. This is still a group of people killing others, and, on top of that, it’s a group who is proving difficult to find. We have to figure out how to stop this crew.”

“I know. I know,” she cried out. “But now I worry about that little boy losing his father.”

“For all you know, that little boy doesn’t even know he has a father out there. For that matter, the father may not even know he has a son. Plus, we have no proof that Don fathered anyone at this time.”

She took a slow, deep breath and nodded. “Good point,” she muttered. “If my brother hasn’t been very stable, maybe he was there with them and then gone.”

“We have to give Don the benefit of the doubt, until more evidence comes in. Yet we can’t let him slip through our fingers. Obviously the net is closing around him, and that’s a good thing.”

“And yet I’m part of the reason that net is closing.” She stared at him, tears in her eyes. “And that makes me feel like shit.”

“Would you like to go talk to the family of the security guard who just died?”

She flushed, looked down at her trembling hands, then whispered, “You know I don’t.”

He got up and crouched in front of her. “I’m not trying to be mean,” he began.

“This is not an easy scenario for you, and I get it. However, it’s not easy for anybody else involved either.

Four people are dead, and nobody in the gang of gunmen cared about them.

They just shot them and went on their way. ”

She shuddered, but he didn’t stop there.

“There was no need to kill people, but somebody in that group is trigger-happy. He’s been a little too willing to let others die so he can get his stolen goods, and we can’t let that continue.

We don’t yet know anything about this little boy in the park and have no confirmation that he’s even related to you.

So, let’s wait until we get more information. ”

She stared at him and nodded slowly. “The problem with that is, what happens when they don’t get back to us?”

“This is Terk’s people. They will get back to us.” He nodded. “I know that waiting is terrible, but jumping to conclusions—good or bad—isn’t helpful either.”

She didn’t say anything but got up abruptly.

“I’ll go have a nap.” She headed to her room and collapsed on the bed, pulling the blankets over her shoulders, as she tried to process everything going on.

Just the thought that her brother had a child out there made her want to shake Don and to ask him what the hell he was doing that was more important than looking after that little boy?

Yet she still had no idea if he even knew he had a son.

As she thought about the little boy she’d seen in the park, she recalled that he appeared happy and content, with a mother who really seemed to care. For that at least, she was grateful. She had no proof that he was her nephew, yet she also had a certain knowing within.

She didn’t know if her brother knew of the child’s existence.

If he did, maybe he was okay with this estrangement.

Maybe he was happy to let the mother go off and raise Don’s child all alone, even though he himself had been adopted and then returned, left to the cold and lonely realities of the foster care system.

She couldn’t even imagine what Don had gone through because, although some counseling had probably been available, how often did that ever help?

Particularly at that age? He had lost his adoptive family and had been put back into the system, instead of going to the extended family of his biological parents.

Why didn’t someone else take him? Could it be they couldn’t handle him, or maybe they just didn’t want him?

Without children of her own, she couldn’t even imagine the thought process that went into that or how hard it would be to make that decision.

It couldn’t be easy, and all she could do was hope that this would be over soon and that she would get to meet her twin brother, assuming he didn’t wind up dead in a shootout.

She had no doubt that, since people were dying during these crimes, the police would shoot first and would ask questions later.

They had to get this stopped, and, one way or another, these gunmen would go down.

She would simply have to make peace with the fact that she had a hand in it.

And that, if something didn’t break to help them save Don first, that little boy maybe could lose his father.

It tore at her, inside and out, to even think that her brother was this far gone. Yet she didn’t have a hand in his current activities; she couldn’t have. The crimes weren’t her fault, but still, the grief ate at her. When a knock came on her bedroom door, she called out to Morrison, “Come in.”

He opened the door, checked on her, and smiled. “Hey,” he greeted her in a soothing tone. That voice of his was so serene and gentle that it brought tears to her eyes. She’d never met anybody so empathetic, while he helped to tear apart her world.

“So, I know the news is not always what we want it to be,” he began, “but I can tell you that your brother did not father the boy we saw earlier.”

She frowned. “But I felt Don’s energy around them.”

“And there could be many simple reasons for that. Maybe Don took an Uber, and then this mother and her son took the same Uber,” he suggested.

“Yet the father of that boy listed on the birth certificate was not Don. We have people going to talk to her right now, but the neighbors have already been contacted and so far it looks as if there’s been no sign of your twin brother being there. ”

“So she probably doesn’t even know Don,” she muttered, sitting up against her headboard to stare at him.

“True, but it’s a lead we need to follow.

Don’t get too excited. These are hard truths and not ones that you may want to hear,” he acknowledged, raising his hands in peace.

“You have a glorified vision of family that I’m sure doesn’t match Don’s experience at all.

Regardless, now is not a good time for fanciful dreams but to face reality. ”

“I just feel so helpless doing nothing,” she muttered, staring at him. “I need to do… something.”

“What is it you want to do?” he asked, sitting down on the side of the bed.

She frowned at him. “I don’t know. Even if we just drove around, hoping to get that energy jolt, I would feel as if I was doing something at least.”

“We can go driving. I’m totally okay with that. I like driving.” He shrugged and added, “We can check all the normal places that Don hangs out at—or just drive aimlessly if you want.”

“As long as we could pick up anything on that, it would be some help, right?”

“Absolutely it would help,” he stated, nodding in agreement. “We might find the juncture where Don’s and Penny’s paths crossed. However, we really need to locate your brother.”

“Right,” she murmured. “So, keeping that in mind, I want to go for a drive, just drive around, find a few places, do a few things. That would be okay, right?” She hopped off the bed, forcing him to stand.

He eyed her. “Do you always get this… unsettled?”

She nodded. “I do. It’s like… it’s as if somebody walked over my grave.”

His eyebrows shot up at that. “Interesting choice of words and not exactly a phrase I would use in this instance.”

“No, maybe not,” she murmured, “but it feels right.”

“That’s usually somebody stalking, somebody reaching out to talk to you.” He hesitated and then asked, “Have you at any point in time had anybody reach out to you, energy-wise?”

She frowned at him. “You mean, like my twin brother?”

“Yes, Don or maybe other strangers.”

“No,” she replied, “at least none that I recognized. I’ve really only been doing this since I found out about my twin brother.”

“Maybe you should sit down and try it tonight before you go to bed. Just open up and see if anybody out there is trying to contact you. You might be surprised.”

Later that night, rather than taking Morrison at his word—and certainly not ready to open up her senses to anybody who might be wanting to contact her—she turned instead to social media, now that she had a name for the girlfriend.

Penny , and her son’s name was Anderson.

These two crossed paths with her twin brother.

She knew it was a long shot, but it was the only shot she had right now.

So she looked for information on the family, and when she came across it, she was delighted.

She walked out to the living room to find Morrison still working.

“I just found Penny on social media.”

He looked up at her with interest. “Anything on it?”

“Lots of playdates and stuff,” she murmured. “Yet nothing about her partner. I’ve gone back as far as I can, but, since I’m not friends with her, I can’t see a whole lot.” She sat down and showed him the links.