For fifteen years he’d believed that Nellie had taken thirty thousand dollars and left town for good.

That afternoon, before climbing into his truck, he turned to his secretary. “Find out everything about Nellie’s life after she left my house. Where she lived, who was with her, and how she lost that leg.”

Four days later, the secretary came into his office with a heavy face. He laid a birth certificate on the desk, and a death certificate on top of it.

“Doctor, you had a son,” he said quietly. “His name was Sawyer Fields.”

Alistair read the date of death, and something in his chest tore open. The boy had died at ten years old — at a construction site owned by the Crestview Clinic.

And the signature on the paperwork that buried the accident belonged to his own mother, Katie Carpenter.