Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68598 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68598 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
“I guess I’ll just explain as you go,” she said quietly. “That right there is a contract.”
I blinked, my eyes trying to focus on the words.
Contract of conception between Lacy F. Murillo and Lisbeth and Farrell Pegues.
I frowned, my eyes going over the information.
Lisbeth and Farrell hired me over eight years ago to find their missing child that their surrogate had stolen. One second they’d been celebrating their pending arrival, and the next, they were searching everywhere for their missing surrogate.
The surrogate had been twenty-four-year-old Lacy Murillo of Boise, Idaho.
Lacy and Lisbeth had been best friends since they were children, so Lisbeth had told me she’d felt overly confident in her best friend doing the right thing when it came to her child.
What was brand new in the file was a second contract.
The first contract had been from their first IVF attempt. The second contract was from their fourth.
“The differences in the contract are highlighted in the next frame. See if you can spot the differences yourself, though, in the two contracts before you move on to the second screen,” she urged.
So I did, reading them line by line.
I didn’t see it at first.
Not until she told me to go ahead and move on to the third screen that showed the differences between the two contracts.
I sucked in a breath.
For the first contract, it said mother/egg retrieval as/from “Lisbeth Pegues.” However, for the second, it showed mother/egg retrieval as/from “Lacy Murillo.”
What. The. Fuck?
I went to the contracts to double-check, and sure enough, the names were different.
I frowned hard.
“Which one of these did you find, and which one did I have originally?” I asked.
“Original,” she showed me the second one. “This is the one you were given. This is the one that I supplied for you.”
I frowned even harder.
“How many attempts were there again?” I asked.
“Four,” she answered.
I nodded and moved on, my confusion already rolling like a black cloud through my veins.
Why would the mothers/egg retrievals be one person for the first three and another on the last? And why would I be told about the one but not the other?
The rest of the file was fairly standard. When I’d first started looking for the pregnant woman and eventually the child that she would have, I was given information.
Name—Lacy Murillo.
Age at the time—twenty-three.
Sex—female
Last known location: Boise, Idaho.
Parents—deceased.
Living family—two brothers, Anthony and Timothy Murillo, ages at the time, twenty-six and twenty-seven.
From there, it was sightings, possible sightings and where family and friends thought she might be going.
Though, just sayin’, but at the time I’d asked for the information from her family and friends, none of them besides Lisbeth, who’d said she was her best friend, had been willing to give me anything.
From the very beginning, I’d always been somewhat skeptical about this case, but with the contract in favor of Lisbeth and Farrell, I’d given it my all and tried to locate her.
However, once I had located her—which, at this point, I might never locate her—I would need the whole story before I’d give her up.
Especially now that I was no longer so black and white when it came to following the rules.
In my opinion, rules were meant to be broken.
Though, I wasn’t sure I’d have had the same mindset when I’d first gotten the case.
I would’ve listened to her side of the story, though.
I flipped to the next page, expecting to find nothing past it like I always did, and felt my stomach bottom out.
It was a live birth certificate.
One that I’d most certainly never seen before.
Julie Murillo. Date of birth was left blank. White. Mother: Lacy Murillo. Father: Kobe Sano.
I felt my stomach sink as I read that last part.
What in the actual fuck?
“What?” I croaked.
She wasn’t mine.
“She’s not yours,” Folsom answered. “There’s one more page.”
It was a hospital report in Kilgore, Texas. One for a mother and a child.
Something sparkled to life in my mind, and a realization started to dawn.
The child. The one I’d helped to deliver the day before I’d gone to prison for way too many years of my life…it’d been her. The one that I’d been looking for. The unsolvable case. Right there all along.
I’d found her? All this time, and I’d been that close?
Just as I’d made that discovery, Folsom hissed from my side and then said, “Julie Payne, no ma’am!”
I jerked my head up to see JP on the top of the monkey bars, frozen and seconds away from jumping off the edge.
My heart beat a little bit faster to see her that far off the ground.
“Ahh, but Mom!” JP cried. “I just want to jump from here to there!”
“There” was a swath of silk that was hanging from a tree. It was about six feet away, and there was no way she’d be able to make it from the monkey bars to the silk without getting unbearably close to the ground.