Chap 2

Part 2: Hazel’s voice was even smaller now.

“Your number was in Mommy’s phone and she doesn’t put people in there unless they matter. We heard your voice before.”

“My voice?”

“Mommy has old voicemails,” Iris said in the background, speaking louder now that her 911 call was finished. “She plays them when she thinks we’re asleep. Sometimes when she cries.”

Every muscle in Griffin’s body locked.

He could not breathe.

Old voicemails.

Sloan had kept them.

After ten years, she had kept them.

And two little girls with dark hair and green eyes were asking if he was their father.

He had no answer that wouldn’t crack the world open.

So he did the only thing he could.

“I’m almost there,” he said. “Listen for the sirens. Open the door for the paramedics. I promise you I’m coming.”

He hung up before his voice broke.

By the time Griffin reached the narrow Fremont street, an ambulance was

already outside the house.

The front door stood open.

Paramedics were wheeling Sloan toward the ambulance on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over her face, her dark hair loose against the pillow, her skin pale under the porch light.

For one awful second, he could see her exactly as she had looked ten years ago the morning she left him—beautiful, unreachable, already halfway gone.

Then two little figures stepped into the doorway behind the paramedics.

And the world stopped.

They were wearing mismatched pajamas and rain boots with cartoon stars. Their hair fell to their shoulders in identical dark waves. Their faces were Sloan’s—same delicate bone structure, same expressive mouths, same thoughtful eyes.

But the eyes themselves were his.

A clear, impossible green.

The same shade his mother used to call moss after rain.

The same eyes he saw in the mirror every morning.

The same eyes staring at him

now with desperate recognition.

“You came,” one of them whispered.

Griffin dropped to his knees on the wet front step so he would be level with them.

“Of course I came.”

The quieter twin—Iris, he guessed—studied him openly. “You sound exactly like the voicemails.”

The other twin, Hazel, stepped closer, as if drawn by something she could not explain. “And you have our eyes.”

Griffin felt his heart fracture and expand at the same time.

A paramedic approached. “Sir, are you family?”