Chapter Thirty
Baxter
I hadn’t expected this visit to be pleasant. There was a reason I’d put it off for so long. But so far, it was surpassing even my expectations for awkwardness. The atmosphere changed the moment I said the name Owen. A snowstorm passing through couldn’t have turned the air any more frigid.
They exchanged a look. I knew them well enough to recognize it for what it was: a warning not to talk.
I tightened my grip on Lake’s hand. He didn’t complain or pull away, even though my fingernails must have been digging into his skin.
“A neighbor thought I was him,” I said. “So I know he’s been here.
And I know he looks like me. I just don’t understand how that’s possible. ”
My father cast another quick glance at my mother. “He’s going to find out eventually,” he said. “We may as well be the ones to tell him.”
“Tell me what?” I’d tried to read their thoughts a few times since arriving, but each attempt had been blocked. Given this wasn’t an ability they’d ever possessed before, it begged the question of why they’d gotten better at it. Who had they been trying to block out? Owen? Or someone else?
My mother shifted in her seat. “Owen is your brother. Your… twin brother.”
The words hit like a punch to the gut. All the evidence had been pointing toward Owen being a brother, unlikely as that had seemed, but a twin brother was a whole extra layer of fucked up.
“How?” Lake asked before I could find my voice. “How can Baxter have a twin brother and never have known about it?”
“Yeah,” I managed hoarsely. “That.”
“Remember how you were six weeks premature?” my father asked.
I nodded. “I don’t remember, obviously. But you told me growing up about the respiratory distress. About how I needed an incubator for the first week of my life.”
“You both did,” my mother said softly, fondness in her tone as her gaze turned unfocused, as if she were picturing the scene. “You lay there so tiny, the both of you. You held hands in the incubator. You wouldn’t let go of each other. You hated being separated. My little Baxter and Owen.”
My heart hammered in my chest, and I felt like I might throw up.
The coffee didn’t help, but I couldn’t pretend it was the only reason.
Lake’s hand became my anchor, the only thing stopping me from floating up to the ceiling.
Or bolting for the door so I didn’t have to hear the rest of the story I’d come here for.
“What happened?” Lake prompted.
My father’s brow furrowed. “Someone took Owen. We believe the intention was to take both of you, but a nurse disturbed him. She challenged him, but he barged past her and knocked her out cold. By the time someone raised the alarm, he’d already escaped the hospital and taken Owen with him.
My mother picked up the thread. “It’s not like baby snatching wasn’t treated seriously even back then. It was. But it was as if he walked out of the hospital and vanished into thin air.”
I fought through a mouth gone painfully dry. “And you never thought to tell me I had a twin?” The word felt alien on my tongue.
“We thought Owen was dead,” my father said. “They took him from an incubator. You weren’t strong enough to be removed from yours for another four days. What chance did he have when he couldn’t even breathe on his own?”
“But he survived,” Lake said.
My mother nodded. “He turned up on our doorstep a few days before the funeral… before your funeral.” My nausea doubled, and I briefly wondered how they’d react if I decorated their rug with this morning’s breakfast. I focused on breathing, but all that did was draw more coffee into my lungs.
Coffee. Blood. Pain. Lake let go of my hand to rub slow, soothing circles on my back.
“Somehow,” my father said, “he tracked us down. At first, we thought it was you. That there’d been some terrible mix-up. That someone else had been killed instead.”
“He killed me,” I said. I needed the words out there. “Owen was the one who did it.”
Frozen stillness followed. Then my mother laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. They caught the man who murdered you. Not straight away, but years later. He’s in prison.”
I looked her straight in the eye. “I know. I met him. And I’m telling you, it wasn’t him.”
“Maybe tell us what happened next,” Lake suggested. “Give us a clearer picture. Then we can discuss everything else.”
My father continued. “He was devastated that he’d never gotten to meet you.
” He had. He’d just done it with a blade in a car park.
“He wanted to attend the funeral, but we were worried it would upset people. Burying one man while someone who looked exactly like him stood there…” He trailed off.
“If people had known about him, maybe. But they didn’t. ”
“And after?” I asked. “You just… what? Swapped me for him?”
“It wasn’t like that,” my mother said defensively. “But we weren’t about to turn him away. He had a pregnant girlfriend. They needed somewhere to stay.”
I laughed, sharp and humorless. “Oh, it gets better. My replacement was straight. You must have thought all your Christmases had come at once.”
“Baxter,” Lake warned.
I understood what he was trying to say. There were still things we needed to know. I couldn’t afford to lose my temper yet.
“Things were good at first,” my mother said.
“At first?”
“It turned out the baby wasn’t his. He wanted it to be, but that didn’t make it true. They had a blazing row. She left. He changed after that.”
“Changed how?” Lake asked.
“He withdrew. Sometimes he’d call in sick to work and stay in his room for days at a time. He refused to talk about the past, but we got the impression it wasn’t pleasant.”
“He got meaner,” my father added. “He used our thoughts against us.”
So that explained how they’d learned to block me.
“He blamed us for being taken,” my father continued.
“We don’t know that,” my mother said quickly. “He never said it.” Her fingers tightened around her mug. “But he never said he didn’t either.”
“When he moved to Scotland for work,” my father said, “it was a relief. No more dealing with mood swings. No more treading on eggshells.”
Lake’s hand fell from my back as I sat forward, coffee be damned. “Where is he now?”
They stared at me blankly. My father folded his newspaper. “Scotland. We just said.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore. He’s back in London.”
“We need to know where to find him,” Lake said, urgency creeping into his voice. “So anything you can tell us… hangouts, friends he might be staying with, ex-girlfriends, old jobs… anything.”
“You’ll probably get a visit from the police,” I added. “They’ll be asking the same questions.”
My mother blinked. “The police?”
“I already told you he was the one who stabbed me nineteen years ago.” I held up a hand as she opened her mouth.
“I know you don’t believe me. You’ve made that clear.
That doesn’t change what happened. And last night, he tried to kill Jamie.
You remember Jamie, right? Much as you tried to ignore his existence back then. ”
They nodded stiffly.
My father frowned. “Let’s say we believed you, why would he attack Jamie?”
“Because we saw each other last week,” I said.
“And he was probably watching.” A part of me recognized how crazy it sounded.
It wasn’t, though; it was all true. I felt it to my core.
“He intended it as a message. And before you tell me that’s ridiculous, tell me who else looks and sounds like me, but is older. ”
My mother shook her head. “This is… it’s all too…” Her words failed her, and she looked smaller and more fragile than I’d ever seen her.
“Help us out here,” I urged. “Tell us how to find him. For his sake and mine. He’s not well, and he needs help. If we can find him, we can make sure he gets that before something terrible happens.” Like him finding me first. “He must have been in contact.”
“He hasn’t,” my father said. “We thought he was still in Scotland.”
I studied their faces, searching for tells instead of thoughts. I didn’t see any.
“When was the last time you heard from him?” Lake asked. “A month? Six months? A year? A frame of reference would be useful.”
They exchanged another look. “He sent you a birthday card,” my mother said.
My father nodded. “He did. But it didn’t have a return address or anything useful.”
A loud knock cut through the room. My mother frowned and stood, Lake and I both following suit. “That’ll be the police,” I said.
I’d hoped to be long gone before they got here, but I should have known Ben would be more efficient than that. At least the speed suggested they were taking the identity of Jamie’s assailant seriously.
Ben showed no surprise—unless you counted the slightest lift of an eyebrow—when the door opened to reveal Lake and me standing there. Calisto liked to call it his professional front. Ben wasn’t alone, two plainclothes officers flanking him. I gave them a brief nod before moving past.
Ben caught up with Lake and me before we could get in the car and drive off, dashing any hope we had of making a clean escape.
“Anything I should know?” he asked. In the background, the two officers introduced themselves to my mother. She was having quite a day of it.
It was tempting to answer Ben’s question with a simple no.
But, professional front or not, I needed to remember he was on my side.
“Twin brother,” I said, avoiding eye contact.
“One I never knew I had. They don’t know where he is or how to get in touch with him.
At least, that’s the story they told me. ”
“Do you believe them?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “They’re not good liars.
” I laughed at my own words. “Or maybe they are. They told me one absolute whopper for my entire life. Oh, and you should probably know that he can read minds just like me.” I unlocked the car and opened the door.
Ben was still watching me. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Well, for a start, you didn’t tell me you were coming here.”
“I wanted to talk to them first. This is about me. It’s my life. I deserved to hear it from the horse’s mouth instead of second-hand.”
“You did,” Ben agreed. “But now you need to go back to the hotel and let us do our jobs. Don’t go playing hero.”
I studied him. “You realize that if Calisto hadn’t played hero once upon a time, you’d most likely be dead now. Just another statistic in O’Reilly’s twisted, blinkered game to get her daughter back without anyone getting in her way.”
“I do realize that,” Ben said evenly, his gaze never leaving mine. “But just because that worked out doesn’t mean it’s a blueprint for everything else.”
“DCI Weaver?”
Ben turned as the officer called his name from the doorway. The message was obvious—the investigation was moving on without him. He took a few steps back. “I have to go. Keep your phone switched on. I may need to talk to you.”
I watched until he disappeared into the house, and the door closed. A dull pounding had started up behind my eyes. I realized I’d been staring into space for too long when Lake eased the car keys from my hand and gave me a gentle nudge toward the passenger seat. “I’ll drive.”
“Calisto won’t like that,” I said as I climbed in. “He wasn’t a huge fan of me borrowing it in the first place. You’d think now that he has a Porsche and a boyfriend who could buy him any car he wants, he’d be less precious about it, but apparently not.”
Lake started the engine. “I’m sure he’d prefer me driving it to you wrapping it around a lamppost because your concentration’s shot.”
“My concentration is fine.” It would have sounded more convincing if I hadn’t already leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. “Not the hotel,” I added after a few moments. “Not yet.”
“Where, then?”
“I don’t know.”