27

Dolly

I sit at the cafe and wait. Craig walks in right on time. Hank is with him.

“Both of you?” I ask.

“What do you want, Dolly?” Craig asks. He sits across from me. Hank stands.

“Sit down, Hank.”

Hank sits.

“I don’t appreciate you letting that asshole take me,” I say. They both know I’m talking about Oscar. They don’t know I don’t think he’s an asshole at all.

He’s a soft, gooey man with a soft, gooey heart.

“And I don’t appreciate you letting him beat the shit out of me,” Craig says.

“You got beat up by a suit,” I say. Craig frowns. He doesn’t like to look weak. “I’m surprised you’re admitting it.”

I raise my coffee to my lips and sip.

“Are you going to go order a drink?” I ask. “This place makes a mean caramel latte.”

“Get to the point, sis.”

“I want to know why you wanted Shadowvale so much,” I say.

“You know why.”

“No, I know you worked for his dad.”

“For a time.”

“And I know you don’t like Oscar in particular. Why?”

Craig cocks his head. This is the negotiation point.

“What’s in it for me?”

“I know where he is,” I say. “I’ve been to his place. I even know the fucking password to get in.”

“You fuck that out of him?” Hank asks.

I bristle. Then I remember this is all part of the plan.

“Something like that,” I say.

Craig nods. He believes me. He’s always thought I was kind of a slutty loser, so this fits with his previous idea of who I am.

“Tell us,” he says.

“You first.”

He leans back and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Mr. Shadowvale paid me a lot of money.”

“And what exactly did you do for him?”

“I built the websites.”

“What?”

“No one knew where he was getting the kids,” he says. “The only thing people knew was there was a website with kids who were from great backgrounds: genius-level IQ parents. Rich parents. These were babies who had been bred for greatness.”

“And you built a website that, what, highlighted this?”

“Oh, I built multiple websites,” Craig says. “This was ten years ago. All of the kids had already been adopted. Shadowvale wanted to make sure that if people had questions about the legitimacy of the adoption agency as the children grew that there was something in place.”

“So, what, you just built a fake site?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Fake pictures. Fake testimonials. Fake stories. Fake families. I wrote biographies of parents waiting to adopt, I wrote stories about kids who had been adopted. I did all of it. We made it look real.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then Shadowvale’s wife started to ask questions,” he says.

“What?”

“Megan,” Craig clarifies.

“What did Megan do?”

“Nothing. Not at first. She was talking to someone at a function when they mentioned how much they liked working with Edgar to adopt their kid.”

“And she didn’t know anything about the project?”

“Nope.”

“So she asked him?”

“Yep.”

“And what was his response?”

“He wanted everything scrubbed from the web,” Craig says. “Literally everything.”

I have to be honest. There’s a part of me that’s wildly shocked my brother did any of this, much less without ever getting caught.

“Just because Megan asked a question.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “He was afraid of her.”

“Are you seriously telling me that Edgar Shadowvale was scared of his wife?”

“He was terrified,” Craig says. “He’d done so many things to seem legit. He’d tried his best to make sure that everything looked like it was on the up-and-up. He only stopped doing the adoptions because he started making more on other ventures.”

“There must be something more,” I said.

“There is,” Hank says. “Megan’s sister was the one who scared Edgar into shutting everything down.”