CHAPTER 1

“O pen your mouth for me,” the agent, who was sitting across from the table from her, requested.

Heidi did, and the swab swirled around the inside of her cheek. She swallowed when it was pulled out and stuck into a tube.

“All done,” he added.

“Thanks,” she replied. “So, what happens now?”

“We’ll send for the DNA results just to be sure, but based on your father’s fingerprints matching the ones he submitted when he worked as a janitor for the school system, we know he’s Joseph Richardson. Combined with what you’ve told me, it seems like you’re Hollis Richardson, Miss Ramsey,” he said with a sorrowful nod. “I can’t tell you what to do from here; you’re an adult now. But if you were a child, we’d return you to your custodial parent.”

“What happens to my dad?”

“We have him in custody,” the agent replied. “He’s cooperating and answering questions.”

“I want to get him a lawyer,” she said.

“He has a public defender with him.”

“Can I pay for someone for him?”

“That’s up to you and your father, really,” he said. “You can visit him, if you want. We’ll be extraditing him back to the US for his arraignment hearing, so if you want to talk to him before that, you should do so today or tomorrow.”

“Has he said why?” she asked, wanting to know the answer to that question more than anything.

“I’m not sure. I’ve been assigned to you. There are other agents speaking with him,” he explained. “If you’d like, I can take you to see him.”

She wanted to shake her head and tell the agent she didn’t want to see her father or talk to him ever again, but something in her forced her to nod instead .

The drive to where they were holding him was short, and she wished it had been longer. She needed more time to think about what to ask; what to say. She wasn’t sure if she hated the man, wanted to slap or shove him, or just wanted to hug him and tell him that she forgave him.

“Heidi? My God! Are you okay?” he asked the moment she entered the small interrogation room.

She didn’t say anything. She just stood there with her arms over her chest. Her father was still in his regular clothes, so at least she didn’t have to see him in some prison jumpsuit. When she did later, though, she’d have to deal with the fact that she’d been the one to put him in it. His beard was scragglier than it had been the last time she’d seen him. He’d always needed her to remind him to take care of himself. Who would do that for him if he went to prison?

“I’m fine,” she finally said.

It was then that she noticed that one of his hands was in handcuffs, which were attached to a small metal bar on the table. He hadn’t gotten up to hug her. That would be why.

“Heidi, sit down, please. Let me explain.”

“You took me,” she said. “You told me my mother was dead, and you took me from her.”

“Your mother was being unreasonable. She wouldn’t let me see you. The courts weren’t helpful. I tried, baby. I tried to get custody of you the right way. But when your mom and I divorced, they gave you to her and told me I had to get a better place, a job, and that I could only have supervised visits once every two weeks for two hours if I wanted to see you. I just wanted to see my daughter. Your mom wouldn’t–”

“You took me,” she repeated. “Dad, you kidnapped me, and you took me to another country. You told me my mother was dead. You changed my name. You moved us around because you–”

“I gave you a life, Heidi. I gave you a father. You–”

“You took away my mother,” she interjected. “Dad, she’s been looking for me for thirty years. How could you do that to her?”

“She took you from me ,” he argued, practically spitting out the words.

“You still could’ve seen me. Maybe it would’ve gotten better. But you stole her only child from her, and we lived on the run. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I did it for you, Heidi.”

“My name is Hollis,” she said.

“Your name was Hollis, yes. But your grandmother always thought you looked more like a Heidi, so when we left, I thought that name would work. And it suits you much better than Hollis, Heidi.”

“Dad, I cannot believe you did this,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “How could you?”

“I love you. You’re my only child. Your mother and I didn’t have a great marriage, and when it was over, she tried to spite me by keeping you. I–”

“God, who are you?” she interrupted. “I’m done,” she said to the officer standing at the door. “I’d like to leave now, please.”

“Sure,” he replied, pulling open the door for her.

“Heidi, wait. I can–”

But the door was closed behind her before she could hear whatever her father had been about to say. She leaned back against the wall and let the tears fall. She covered her face and sobbed. Her entire life had been a lie. The father she’d known had taken her from her home. Her mother was still out there, looking for her.

“I can’t imagine how difficult this is for you,” the FBI agent said to her as he touched her shoulder gently. “I can take you home now, if you’d like. I will probably have some more questions for you later, but I think–”

“Does she know about me?” she interrupted him.

“Your mother?”

“Does she know?”

“There’s something you should know about your mom, Heidi,” he said, giving her a look that told her that she should worry, and the strangest thing hit her mind in that moment.

Her name; she’d always hated it. She’d never felt like a Heidi. She’d never felt like it went with her personality or even her features. Hollis… She thought a lot about that name now. Hollis. She kept saying it over and over to herself, trying it on for size and feeling like it fit her better than Heidi ever had. Heidi Ramsey… No, she was Hollis Richardson.

◆◆◆

It was a week later. They’d rushed the DNA. Hollis now knew why. Her mother, the woman she hadn’t seen since she was five years old and who had been looking for her this entire time, had stage-four breast cancer and only months left to live. The FBI had rushed those results just to confirm for Olivia what everyone else already knew, thanks to the confession Hollis’s father had made and her own memories, which had been brought back to life by all the recent discoveries she’d stumbled upon. Heidi was no more. After hearing that name come out of her father’s mouth as he tried to excuse away what he’d done, she decided to never use it again. She was Hollis now. It was the name she’d been given at birth; the name her mother had wanted her to have.

Now that she’d finally found her, though, they’d have hardly any time together.

“Oh, baby,” her mother said, cupping her hand over her mouth as her eyes filled with tears. “Hollis!”

“Hi, Mom,” Hollis said, tearing up as well.

Her mother was in her sixties now, no longer the young woman from Hollis’s memories handing her the balloon. Her blonde hair was gone, replaced with a wrap that covered the baldness from her treatments. Her bright blue eyes were a little duller now, and she was also much thinner than in Hollis’s memories and in the pictures she’d seen since finding out who she really was, but this was her mother. Her voice was a little scratchy, but Hollis knew it. It had been the voice she’d heard in her head and could never explain. That was because, after initially telling Hollis that her mother had died and giving her no explanation, her father had tweaked the story. He’d trained her, programmed her into believing that her mother had died when Hollis had been a baby, making his lies that much worse. Hollis hadn’t believed him at first, of course, but over the years, he’d continued to make mention of how he’d raised her alone. He had taken her real memories of the three of them and replaced them with memories of just the two of them. Instead of the three of them going for ice cream in the summer, it was just her and her father. He’d been so good at this that Hollis now didn’t know which memories were real and which were the lies.

“Come here,” the older woman said, holding out her arms.

Hollis fell into them and instantly breathed her mom in before they both started sobbing as they stood that way, in her mother’s doorway.

Several minutes later, though, Hollis could feel Olivia wobble, likely from weakness.

“We should get inside,” she suggested, wiping her nose and eyes and trying to get out a smile because this was a good day.

“Yes. I’ve made tea, and I have…” Olivia took a step back and just stared at her. “So many things I thought over the years, and now, you’re here.” She smiled wide.

“I didn’t know,” Hollis said.

“I know, sweetie. I know. They told me how you found out. I’m just glad I let that woman interview me for that book. Of all the things to bring you back to me, I thought it might be the website or the news stories, but no, it was some book that some reporter wanted to write.”

“I don’t really know what to do now,” Hollis admitted, laughing through her tears.

“Neither do I,” Olivia replied. “Let’s go into the kitchen.”

Hollis stepped farther inside the house, and it was only then that it clicked for her. She’d arrived in an Uber she’d taken from the airport and had been so nervous, she hadn’t paid much attention. Now, her luggage was sitting on the front steps of her childhood home.

“This is the same house,” she said softly.

“Yes. You remember it?” her mother asked, walking slowly through the living room, holding on to Hollis’s hand.

“The kitchen is through there.” She pointed.

“Yes,” her mother replied, smiling still.

“My bags are…” Hollis said, remembering.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’d help you with–”

“No, it’s okay. I only have two. I can get them.”

She went to turn to go, but her mother’s frail hand held on to her own.

“Mom, I’ll be right back,” she said, looking Olivia right in the eye.

The older woman nodded, and tears fell from her eyes.

Hollis grabbed her luggage and placed both bags in the living room, taking a closer look around the room. It was small. There was a sofa and a chair in the corner. The coffee table looked old but clean. In fact, everything in the room looked clean. She wondered if her mother had cleaned for her. Hollis hoped not. There was a flat-screen TV opposite the sofa that was a modest size. The fireplace looked like it had seen better days and hadn’t been used in a while. The framed pictures on the wall behind the sofa, though, were what really caught Hollis’s attention, so she walked closer, hearing her mother moving around in the kitchen. There were at least ten photos of Hollis hanging up. Her father had shown her a few pictures of her from the one photo album he’d likely swiped from the house before he took her, so she’d seen some pictures of herself as a baby, but she hadn’t seen these. Some slots in that album had also been missing photos, but she’d chalked that up to the fact that he’d never really cared much for organizing or presentation.

“That was the day we took you home from the hospital,” Olivia said, walking back into the room, carrying a tray with two teacups on it .

“Let me get that for you. I would have–”

“I can carry a tray of tea, Hollis,” she replied. “Or do you prefer Heidi? I don’t want to–”

“No, I don’t want to be Heidi. That’s the name he gave me,” she interrupted. “And I don’t know how any of this works, but I’d like to change my name, if I can. I never liked Heidi to begin with. It always felt… foreign.” She took the tray from Olivia anyway and placed it on the table. “I guess now I know why.”

“I picked ‘Hollis’ out of a baby book,” Olivia shared as she sat down on the sofa. “We didn’t know if we were having a boy or a girl, so we picked a name that we thought could work for both.”

“It’s pretty,” Hollis replied, smiling and sitting down next to her.

“Can you… Did he ever… Were…”

“No,” Hollis said, taking her mother’s hand and placing it in her own lap. “No, he never hurt me. Believe it or not, he was a good dad.” She shook her head. “We just moved around a lot, and I wasn’t allowed to join things very often. I wanted to play soccer at one of the schools, but he told me we couldn’t afford it or something. It wasn’t the best way to grow up, I imagine, but it was far from the worst. We didn’t always have a lot of money, but I never went hungry or anything. It was normal to me at the time.”

Her mother’s tears started to fall again, and she said, “That was the hardest part about not knowing: I was only ever ninety-nine percent sure you were with him. Even the FBI told me they couldn’t be one-hundred-percent sure because your father had left everything in his apartment, including his truck. They said something could’ve technically happened to both of you, but it was likely that it was him. I held on to that all these years because I hoped that if you were with him, you were at least safe. If something had happened to both of you, there was no telling what it could have been.”

“I’m okay,” Hollis said, giving her mother’s hand a little squeeze. “I had a good life, Mom. I just still haven’t really processed all of this. A little over a week ago, I was in Vancouver, checking new books into my library, and I saw my face on the cover of one of them. I thought I was crazy.”

“She asked to put you on the cover.”

“I was a blonde, white girl. That was probably the reason.”

“I don’t think so.” Olivia shook her head a little. “She put the pictures of the other children on the back cover, but she said that there was something about your eyes that she hoped would draw people to the book, and maybe they’d think of something or someone they’d seen that would help find all these kids. She does this for a living, so I just trusted her. And she was right. You saw something. You’re here.”

“She writes books about missing kids for a living? What a job,” Hollis noted.

“No. I told you; she’s a reporter. She has one of those shows. It’s been on the Crime Channel for years. Kenna Crawford. Do you not get the show in Vancouver?”

Hollis hadn’t seen the show or heard of Kenna Crawford beyond the fact that she’d seen the woman’s name on the book under the title.

“No, I don’t.”

“She did an episode on you, too. It was on parents who were still looking for their kids after decades. She talked to me about you; and another family, about their missing son. That’s how we met. Then, she asked about the book, and I said yes. She donated all proceeds from the sales to the Center of Missing and Exploited Children, so I don’t think she’s in this for the money.”

“She sounds like a good person,” Hollis replied.

“I need to call her to tell her that you found me,” her mom said, smiling at Hollis before cupping her cheek. “You found me, sweetie.”

Hollis leaned forward then and kissed her mother’s forehead before she burst back into tears for all the time she’d lost and the limited amount of time they had left together.