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“I know of Terkel. There’s a difference. I heard of him, when I was working with Celia, as part of her research into these abilities. She understands me better than I do,” she explained. “I never worked with Terk directly.”

“He says that he knows your energy though, so that would mean, in his world, that you work in the healing arts.”

“Hardly. I’m a dental hygienist, so I don’t think very many people would consider that among the healing arts.”

“Yet you probably participated in a healing event with your adoptive mother.”

She winced. “Right, so that would be considered the healing arts.” She sighed.

“What do you do when somebody passes, someone who spent their life raising you and giving you a good home? What if, in her passing, she shares a secret that devastates you? Up until that point in time, I did everything I could to make her passing as easy as possible, to make her whole illness as easy as possible,” she shared, nodding.

“I took six months off work to be her full-time caregiver, and only in the last couple days before her death did she tell me the truth.”

Sadie shook her head. “I don’t think she was even conscious after that,” she murmured.

“So, I never had a chance to ask her more questions or to rail at her for having done what she did.” She stared at him.

“Not having answers just eats away at you,” she murmured.

“It’s ugly, and you want to know so much more, yet there won’t be any more. It just is what it is.”

“What about your adoptive father?”

“He had a heart attack and passed away a few months after Mom died.” Then she stopped, frowned, and added, “I lost both of them in the last seven months.” She sighed.

“Time just got away in my world, and I didn’t even know when I was coming and going anymore.

You go from the death of one to the other, and you’re numb to anything else.

My adoptive mom was quite ill. So just trying to deal with her zapped all my energy, and then, when she was gone, she left me with this bombshell, and I’m still trying to sort it all out. ”

“She probably didn’t dare tell you earlier, afraid that it would change the way you felt about her.”

“Maybe.” She stared at him. “I have to admit it would have, at least at first. Would I have hated her? No. She was still good to me, and looking after her all those months was something that I felt I owed her. Whether that was further bonding on her part, before she unloaded her secrets, I don’t know, but I did feel strongly that I needed to do that.

Now I’m at a loss. I went from having two loving parents to having two loving adoptive parents who rejected my twin brother because he was trouble.

And I grew up thinking I already had a brother, but he was not my blood relative. ”

“So your twin brother, your blood brother, may have considered pulling the trigger on your adoptive brother. This alone shows you your twin’s behavior in the here and now.

Maybe your twin was already some bad seed even way back then, and your adoptive parents didn’t feel they could cope with the added stress.

Plus, as parents, I’m sure they felt very protective of their son and of you. ”

“That’s pretty much what she told me. Yet, as the child who got to stay, I feel a certain amount of despair that my twin brother didn’t get the same opportunities in life that I did.

And now that I see what he potentially could be up to, it makes me wonder if that still would have happened if he had been raised with me. ”

*

Morrison could see that Sadie was still grappling with the emotional bombshell her adoptive mother had shared from her deathbed, not to mention the accompanying grief and the sense of betrayal.

He kept his tone calm and centered as he spoke.

“Did she ever mention anything specific about what he did that upset her or what caused them to not want to keep him?”

She shook her head. “No, she was dying, and the last thing she told me was how I was adopted and how my twin brother wasn’t.

I tried to get her to talk to me further, but, once she had told me, that was all she wanted to do before dying.

That just made it all the more frustrating.

” She dropped her head on her hands. “I mean, you hear about deathbed confessions and all,” she admitted, “but I never expected to hear one myself.”

“Of course not,” he murmured, “and your adoptive father, he didn’t say anything?”

She shook her head. “No, not to me. He avoided my questions, after Mom’s death, saying he was still grieving her loss. Then he had a heart attack and never woke up in the hospital, so whether he would have chosen to share or not later, I will never know.”

Morrison shrugged. “Sometimes people get away with not having to face up to what they’ve done, and maybe, in his case, he just believed that they’d done the right thing.

People often do, without acknowledging what happened to the other person in the equation.

And, if your twin brother was very difficult at a young age, I can’t say that I blame them. ”

She got up, poured a cup of coffee, and muttered, “I understand, and I’m not sure that I could have adopted one without considering the fact that I couldn’t handle the second one. I’m still grateful for the upbringing I had, and that just makes me feel even guiltier.”

“Yet you’re not guilty of anything,” he reminded her.

“I know that. I do, but it doesn’t really help either.” He nodded and watched. She poured a second cup of coffee and handed it to him black, just as he’d had it at the restaurant.

He accepted it and added, “Until we find out more, I’ll stay here.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Oh, you don’t need to do that,” she countered immediately. “Even if it is my twin brother, how will he know that I’m involved? I don’t think he even cares.”

“Why, because he didn’t follow up and find you?”

She stared at him, feeling that sense of betrayal again. “Yeah, I guess.” She put down her coffee cup carefully. “I’m really messed up over this, aren’t I?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Morrison replied. “We aren’t looking for proof that any of this happened. We’re just dealing with how to stop him and his crew now.”

“Of course.”

He grabbed his duffel bag and dropped it by the table. “Do you mind if I stay?”

“No, go for it.”

“I’ll ask about an update. Sometimes phone calls work, but we shuffle files back and forth quite easily too. They should have something on your twin brother at this point, I would think.”

“I would like to know what they found out,” she murmured. “My mother said his name was Don. Does he still go by Don? And what was his life like? Was it decent? I mean, I just hope he was treated okay and had a good childhood.”

Morrison didn’t say anything to that because he had seen kids with the best upbringings turn out to be absolute assholes, with no care for anybody else, and he had also seen kids with the absolute worst upbringings turn out to be wonderful people.

So he wasn’t sure that a happy childhood would make any difference.

Her twin brother was involved in something right now, whether he had chosen it or not. He was in trouble with the law in a big way, and, unless he had a hell of an explanation for why he was doing what he was doing, there wouldn’t be an easy solution for him. Not in this lifetime.

Morrison turned on his laptop, then brought up his email to see if anything was there, and there was.

He quickly brought it up and nodded. “They managed to get into the adoption records,” he shared.

“Your twin brother, Don, was adopted about six months after you were, and”—he kept reading silently, then involuntary winced.

“His adoptive parents were killed in a car accident, and he was put back into the system.”

At that, she sucked in a breath, and Morrison nodded.

“That obviously would have an impact on him, even at a young age.” He studied the file, knowing that the next part would upset her even more.

“He was never adopted again, and he stayed in the foster care system, until he ran away at sixteen and again at seventeen. By the time he turned eighteen, they had no idea where he was. He’d been listed as a constant runaway in the system. ”

As she stared at him, he noted the flood of tears building that she was desperate to control.

Noticing a box of Kleenex nearby, he grabbed it and put it in front of her.

“Best to just deal with it now,” he suggested, as the tears began to slide down her cheeks.

“You can only help him with so much. While I can see that his upbringing may have had a negative effect on him and how he’s living his life now, I’ll also tell you that an awful lot of good people are out there who had really crappy beginnings.

They don’t all end up murdering people in jewelry stores. ”

She swallowed and nodded. “I imagine drugs have a bad effect too.”

“Possibly, but it doesn’t say anything about drugs, substance abuse, or anything. He doesn’t have a rap sheet,” he added. “That does surprise me. Typically someone works up to major crimes like these, but he’s what?” He checked the file to calculate his age. “He’s twenty-eight?”

She nodded. “Yes, we’re twenty-eight. Our birthdays are September 20.”

He nodded. “So, we have enough years for him to form an opinion about life, society, what he’ll do, good or bad, yet without a rap sheet.

That doesn’t make any sense with what we know at present.

He hasn’t done any jail time, which is a good thing,…

but that is odd too.” He shrugged. “He won’t escape prison now, not if he’s involved in this.

Is there any chance that the energy you were sensing isn’t his? ”

“There’s always a chance,” she admitted, staring at him. “How would I know? Maybe ask Terkel that question.”