He remembered Mara as a child, sitting beneath the kitchen table during thunderstorms. He remembered the way she used to reach for his hand whenever their father shouted. He remembered promising her that nothing would ever happen to her as long as he was around.
He had failed to keep that promise.
She had spent nine years surviving without him.
And now she was standing in front of him, exhausted and frightened, still trying to protect a child who was not biologically hers but had become the center of her world.
Colton took her hand.
“I don't know how to forgive you yet.”
Mara nodded.
“I understand.”
“But I don't want to lose you again.”
She began to cry.
He pulled her into an embrace.
This time, when she held him, neither pretended that love erased the damage.
It didn't.
There were years they could never recover, words they could never take back, and questions that might never have answers.
But they were alive.
They were together.
And for the first time in nine years, Colton had a chance to stop searching and start learning who his sister had become.
At the far end of the corridor, Lila stirred in her sleep.
Mara looked toward the door.
Colton followed her gaze.
“She's safe,” he said.
Mara nodded.
“For tonight.”
He looked back at the phone.
The old observatory outside Sedona.
Seven o'clock.
His mother wanted him to come alone.
For twenty-five years, Rebecca had controlled the story of his family by deciding what he was allowed to know.
Tomorrow morning, Colton intended to take that choice away from her.
He would go to the observatory.
He would listen to whatever explanation she had prepared.
But he would not go alone.
And whatever waited for him beneath the Arizona sky, he would face it with the people he had spent his life trying to find.
Because Mara had been right about the star.
You could travel far away.
You could become lost.
You could spend years believing that home was something you had left behind.
But sometimes, if you were fortunate, the people you loved found a way to lead you back.
And sometimes, the most dangerous journey began only after you finally came home.
At six fifteen the next morning, Colton Hayes stood in front of the bathroom mirror in the small room he had rented under a false name.
He had slept for perhaps forty minutes.
The rest of the night had been spent listening to the pipes rattle inside the walls, watching the pale numbers on the digital clock change, and trying to understand how a single telephone call could make the world he had known feel like a carefully constructed lie.
Arthur Vale was his biological father.
Rebecca Hayes, the woman who had raised him and Mara, had apparently helped build the criminal empire that had destroyed their family.
Samuel Hayes, the man Colton had mourned for years, was alive and had been involved in the same operation.
And somewhere beyond Sedona, beneath the rust-colored cliffs and the wide Arizona sky, Rebecca was waiting for him at an abandoned observatory.
Alone, she had said.
Colton turned on the faucet and splashed cold water over his face.
He looked older than he had the day before. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes, a small cut above his right eyebrow from the struggle at the old property, and a faint bruise along his jaw. His dark hair stood unevenly where he had repeatedly dragged his fingers through it.
But it was the tattoo on his forearm that held his attention.
Three curved lines surrounding an eight-pointed star.
When he was a child, Rebecca had told him that the symbol represented the three people who would always protect him: his mother, his father, and his sister. The star, she had explained, represented the home they shared.
Colton had believed her.
He had carried that symbol through his childhood, through the years of anger following Samuel's supposed death, through the disappearance of Mara, and through the lonely adulthood he had built for himself.
Now he wondered whether the tattoo had ever meant what he thought it meant.
Perhaps it had been a family symbol because the family had needed a way to identify its members.
Perhaps it had been a warning.
Or perhaps Rebecca had simply understood that people were more willing to trust a lie when it came wrapped in something beautiful.
His phone vibrated on the sink.
A message from Mara.
I'm awake. Lila is asleep beside me. Darren is here. Don't go anywhere alone.
Colton stared at the words.
He had promised Mara he would not walk into the observatory without support. He had not promised that he would obey her instructions exactly.
There was a difference, and he suspected his sister knew it.
He typed a reply.
I'm not going alone.
He waited a moment, then added:
But I need to hear what she has to say.
Mara's answer came almost immediately.