“Come in,” he called out from inside. “The door’s open.”
I walked inside, where Warren sat at the table eating a sandwich.
“I was expecting you,” he said, dabbing a spot of mustard from the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “You’re a sharp reporter, Claire.” He indicated the pages in front of him.
I walked closer and recognized the headline. My article.
“You’re even better than my private investigators.”
The house was eerily quiet. The tick of the clock on the wall grated.
He clasped his hands together. “To think that military-trained investigators couldn’t find the files at the Sharpe house, but you could.” He shook his head at me in amazement. “Now that’s skill.”
My heart beat faster. My God. He knew of the break-in at Lillian’s home. Worse, he seemed to be responsible for it.
I shook my head. “Warren, I don’t understand.”
“Come, sit down,” he said, pointing to the chair beside him. “I’ve been trying to solve this mystery for many years,” he continued. “It took me a great deal of time to find out what happened to Vera Ray. The case files were mysteriously lost in a fire at the police station. Too convenient, don’t you think? Then I—”
My hand trembled. What is he telling me? What does this all mean? “Warren,” I said, shaking my head, “I don’t understand.”
His smile put me at ease. “At first I thought it was because I wanted to protect my family, to seal away the truth in all of its ugliness. But it’s more than that. It’s a very personal story for me.”
I covered my mouth, the wheels in my mind spinning so quickly I could hardly keep up. “Warren, are you telling me that you think you are…?”
He nodded. “Yes. I killed the story because it needed a new ending. Thomas Kensington was not Daniel.” His smile said everything. “I am. I wanted to tell you myself.”
I gasped. “How did you find out? You were only a boy when—”
“Yes, the past is a blur, of course,” he said. “I was only three when I was taken.”
Taken.
I shook my head, processing the weight of the revelation. I’m looking right at Daniel Ray. He’s been here all along.
“But a boy can sense things, even from a young age,” he said. “Mother looked at me differently than the others.”
“You mean Elaine?”
“Yes,” he said. “At first I thought I must have been less lovable than my sister. But as I got older, I came to wonder if there was something else. One night after a party when Mother and Father had drunk too much wine, I heard them arguing in the parlor. Mother mentioned her name. Vera. She said it was all her fault that I was performing poorly in school. She blamed my grades on Vera’s ‘weak genes.’ Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about or who Vera was. I didn’t think about it again until Aunt Josephine had a stroke in the 1980s. The family gathered around her bed at the hospital. Father hadn’t seen his sister in more than fifty years. He refused to speak to her after a falling-out they had when I was a boy. So when he showed up—when we all showed up—she was hysterical, trying to tell me how sorry she was for ruining my life, for taking me as a child, for taking me away from Vera. Mother and Father said it was only the illness speaking, that her mind wasn’t right, but I knew that wasn’t the case. What she said had to be rooted in truth, and when I began to look into my past, I learned they were protecting me from something very terrible. From what I have pieced together, Vera and my father were madly in love, but she was poor, and the family disapproved of her, but no one more than his sister, Josephine. Vera’s mother worked as her nanny years before. Aunt Josie didn’t like the woman, so she took her anger out on her daughter, Vera. She hated the thought of me, a Kensington, being raised by a commoner, so she took matters into her own hands.”
“Did your father, Charles, know about this?”
“As far as I know, he, tragically, learned the truth from Josephine after Vera’s death,” he said. “I suspect that Josephine worried that being the good man that he was, he’d make sure I was reunited with my mother if she were still living. In her mind, she had to wait until Vera was out